Chapter 16.
It takes most of the day to implement my plan.
I lay out my blanket in the grass at the base of a lonely tree east of Mudcross. I plaster tufts of grass to the gray fabric with a light layer of mud. Leaving it there to dry in the sun, we return south to the hidden tunnel. On the other side, we retrieve the aerial drone from Jarvis’s wagon. It hasn’t been used in weeks, so its solar cells are at full capacity. Starbucks shows me how to operate the controller. The drone whirs into the air. When it’s in the trees, I press a button for the audio. Dance music shatters the silence of the forest.
Immediately, roamers come. They stretch eagerly but vainly toward the bait. I send the drone west. It’s programmed with basic object avoidance, so I don’t have to pay attention to every branch and tree. It collects the infected like a magnet through metal shavings.
For hours, we trawl the z-line. As it did in the ghost-town, the tail of the “zombie-comet” begins to stretch far behind the main group. The two of us are forced to retreat to the northern edge of the trees. We move parallel to the drone, watching it through my spyglass. Starbucks makes short work of any stragglers who wander our way. Further west, the trees thin out, and there’s a dead suburb thick with fresh recruits … if you can call a zombie “fresh.” They join our cause, as does the next suburb after that.
“You think this is overkill?” I ask, looking at the enormous horde now trailing Jarvis’s drone.
“Definitely,” says Starbucks.
“Should we stop?”
“Nope.”
When we do stop, a veritable city of undead surrounds our aerial bait. This damn drone better not run out of power. We lead our subjects back east, then north, straight up the road to Mudcross. The sun is sinking again. Will they still follow in the dark? I hope so. The strange thing about the z-line is that idle undead always seem to return to it. Our mobile bait should keep them interested long enough for our purpose.
A mile from the market-town, Starbucks takes the controls.
“Go,” he says.
I run east through the tall grass, leaving Starbucks behind. I look for the lonely tree where I left my blanket. A stab of panic hits me–Crom, where is it? Oh thank God, there it is. My blanket is waiting. The mud has dried enough to keep the grass in place.
Quickly, I shrug off my pack. Taking only my crossbow, four bolts, a sparker, and the grassy blanket, I hurry back to the grassy rise we used the night before. The sun is down. A rich, deep blue encroaches on the pink smear of horizon. A patchwork of clouds hides the moon. I can barely see the nearest sentry, who stands on a platform above the wooden posts. Hopefully that means he can barely see me. I’m wearing dark clothes, and I’ve smeared my arms and face with mud. Still, my heart is pounding hard as I slither forward through the grass, creeping toward Mudcross. If that sentry is paying particularly good attention, he could still spot me. You can’t outrun a laser.
Closer to Mudcross–perilously close–I cinch the blanket over my back and lie still, listening. The wind whispers a secret song. The walls of the town are barely visible through the tall grass. An odd blue beetle passes inches from my nose, oblivious. It’s funny–as far as the beetle is concerned, there is no World Before, no artifacts, no tragedy, no slaves and masters; the world is the same now as it was before the Fall.
Then a distant noise echoes across the plain. The voice of a long-dead woman singing her heart out. I shift slightly, enough to see the nearest sentry’s dim silhouette. He stands, peering south toward the road.
Not yet.
Inside Mudcross, a sentry shouts. The music grows closer. The drone must be visible from the walls by now. I raise my head slightly, high enough to see above the grass–and yes! Our own personal zombie army marches toward the southern gate of Mudcross. We have may have outdone ourselves. Thousands are coming up the road. The drone is a regular pied piper of the undead. A shot rings out, presumably at the drone. It speeds up in response, zooming toward the market-town. The faster plague-walkers take the lead, running after it.
Now.
I already have a bolt loaded. A cloth bulb full of kindling is tied to the end. The bulb is soaked in the oil from a lamp in Jarvis’s wagon. I use my sparker to light the bolt. It flares up faster than I’d like. I’m turned away from Mudcross, shielding the fire from view, but it feels dangerously bright, a beacon for attention. Quickly, I turn and loose it toward the town. It thuds into the soft mud at the foot of the gate.
Shit!
Furiously, I load another bolt. Somebody had to have seen that. They’ll be looking for more. Still, I creep a few feet closer, light the next one under the cover of my blanket and take a crucial half-second to aim. Before the bolt even lands, I drop under the blanket again, jaw clenched, heart in my throat, praying the sentries haven’t spotted me. Nobody kills me, so it must’ve worked.
An enormous bang rents the air. The music cuts out. I peek through the grass. It’s an amazing sight. The gate is on fire–not just from the bolt sticking into its side, but from the burning fragments of the drone, which has crashed into it, intentionally or not. The wood has been speared by burning debris, and now the undead don’t need their pied piper; the movement of the sentries, the fire, and the sounds inside Mudcross provide all the impetus they require. Zombies are swarming the gate, frenzied, clambering like maggots in a barrel. The fire paints their waxen, bloated faces with a savage orange glow. Laser rifles cut through the crowd from above, shearing off limbs, burning dead flesh. The effort is woefully ineffective–they just keep coming. Some catch fire. They become animate torches, clawing up the wood toward the sentries, screaming silently in the flames, like fugitives from Hell.
A laser singes the grass less than ten paces from me. I lower my head, lying utterly still. Someone hasn’t forgotten those fiery bolts. The sentries aren’t the only danger. The sheer size of the horde is causing it to spread out from the gate. Feet shift in the grass nearby. If I stay, they may walk right over me. I have to get out of here, though it’s dangerous to move.
A ferocious crack splits the air. The southern gate, along with a large section of the barricade around it, has collapsed–even in places untouched by the fire. The accumulated weight of the zombie army has pressed upon it like a massive fist.
In Mudcross, all hell breaks loose. A river of dead flesh floods the breach. Most of the town was already indoors for the night; most of its residents are only just becoming aware of the disturbance. The town is populated largely by sentient robots, but they won’t be armored like Starbucks. Jarvis said the “R-strain” was carried by perhaps one in ten; even that ratio means hundreds of virulent subjects are in Mudcross, capable of infecting robots.
As the town faces its horror, I inch away. The slow-walkers are getting too close for comfort. I turn east, still under the blanket–
–and I’m face to face with a legless corpse worming its way through the grass. It reaches out with a three-fingered hand. I’m rolling away, the blanket enfolding me, restricting me. I kick off the camouflage and tear the axe from my belt. A hand wraps around my ankle. The owner drags itself forward. The other hand latches onto my knee. I bring down the axe … too frantically; the blade only shears off an ear and almost thuds into my own knee. The jaws open for my calf–but my second swing cleaves sideways into its skull. The thing is mush by the time I stop chopping. Another one-legged misfit nears. I hurry to conceal myself again. Luckily, the sentries have already disappeared from the walls.
I’m shaky as I make my way back up the grassy rise. There’s a cacophony of noise from Mudcross. Everyone with a weapon is firing–yet it dies away quickly. Only the screams remain, punctuated by scattered gunfire.
If you thought robots don’t scream, think again. Their instincts are modeled on our own. They’re hardwired to feel fear; it helps preserve the illusion of ego. Yet this goes beyond any normal resp
onse. There’s rage and madness in those digital voices. I can only assume the R-strain is working its sinister magic.
At the top of the rise, I look back. An inferno consumes the barricade. The fire has spread to the buildings inside. This is more than we’d hoped for. It’s too much, in fact. The imprisoned slaves, ironically, are probably the safest people in Mudcross, being in a concrete building near the center of town–yet even they aren’t safe if the ambient heat gets too high or the smoke too thick…
Or if someone deliberately feeds them to the zombies.
It’s a terrible thought. I want to run into Mudcross, but it’s pure suicide. We’ll have to wait for the infected clear out and the fire to die down.
“Tristan.”
Starbucks comes up from the west. He still carries the drone’s controller. He crouches on the rise beside me, surveying the town with a mixture of glee and anxiety. One of his gauntleted hands shakes my shoulder.
“Good work. Now we’ve just got to get them out,” he says.
“You think anyone will be left to stop us?” I ask.
“They’re welcome to try.”
We watch the town burn.
No attempt is made to fight the fire. With so many roamers free, it can’t be done. With enough warning and weapons, the town might’ve been saved. By the time the zombies were inside, the balance between chaos and order was already too lopsided for organized resistance.
There’s a water tower in Mudcross. The fire topples it, bringing a deluge that quashes the flames. In time, we retreat to the tree where my pack is waiting, and I doze off, exhausted.
Starbucks rouses me toward dawn, and we return to the rise, armed for war. He kills seven roamers even over this short distance. They’ve been spreading out from the town.
At the top of the rise: desolation. Mudcross lies in ruins. The remnants of the fire have burned themselves out, though embers smolder in the charred remains. A third of the town has been razed to the ground. The rest is scarcely better off. It looks abandoned. Roamers wander the streets. Many have drifted away or burned up in the flames. Likely they’re already repopulating the z-line. Others were taken out by the residents before the latter were overcome. There’s still plenty left to deal with, however.
We march toward the town, Starbucks with his sickles and a shotgun, I with my crossbow and a laser rifle. My senses are on high alert. My brain puts the litany on auto-repeat:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know,
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
We deal with the undead methodically, stopping and killing them as they appear. It would be a shame to get caught in our own trap. Street by street, we tackle the loaners.
I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea, I think while lasering a roamer’s brains through the back of its skull.
But we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee…
I’m watching for any sentries or vengeful residents, but none materialize. Anyone lucky enough to survive is probably busy salvaging whatever they can. Besides, there’s no way they could know who loosed this plague upon them. As far as they know, we just came to do business.
Toward the center of town, a bronze robot digs frantically in a ten-foot wide crater, clawing the ground with desperate hands. We stop, puzzled–did he dig that whole crater himself? Even my mental litany trips up in confusion. His head darts up. His face is made from the same malleable material as Starbucks’. Rage contorts his features. With a banshee-like scream, he launches himself at us, muddy arms outstretched. Starbucks drops a sickle and goes for the shotgun, but my laser rifle is already raised. A red tracer-beam reveals the path of the deadlier invisible one. The laser swipes an ugly burn-line through the robot’s head. He collapses.
“The R-strain,” Starbucks says, monitoring the remains.
“What was he doing?” I ask
“Being crazy. You know what’s strange? It looks like the flesh-walkers left him alone after he was infected. Somehow, they knew.”
At the end of the street is the concrete prison-bunker in which I glimpsed Echo. We take out a plague-walkers and our goal is within reach. The guards are gone, of course, but when I try the iron door, it’s locked.
“Echo! Echo, can you hear me?” I shout.
“Not so loud,” Starbucks says, glancing around.
Voices inside. Questions, comments, disbelief.
“Is that you, boy?” a gruff voice asks. One of the caravaners.
Starbucks reaches for one of the high, small windows. He hoists himself up until he can see inside. Cheers greet him. He shushes them and asks questions. I can’t make out the answers. When he drops back down, his face is grim.
“He took them,” Starbucks says.
“What?”
“The Demon of the Grasses. Echo, Jarvis, Octavia, Milly, and Jareth all left with him yesterday. The others don’t know where they went.”
It takes a minute to absorb the information.
“No. No, no, she was here. I saw her in the window,” I protest.
“He must’ve come while we trawled for infected,” Starbucks says.
We both look around, a thought plain between us: did we kill them? If the Grass Man removed them from the bunker but kept them in town for the night … There’s a charred inn right across the plaza. A half-eaten corps slumps in the alley nearby. They could all be ash and we’d never know it. It’s too cruel a thought.
“They weren’t here during the fire,” Starbucks says.
“How can you be sure?” I whisper.
“Tristan, there’s only one reason the Grass Man himself would come for them. He found a buyer. If they were being sold in Mudcross, the auctioneers would’ve put them on the block or the buyer would’ve come directly. The Grass Man would have no reason to turn up again. But he took them from this bunker, not someone else. Which means he found a buyer outside the town. Someone radioed in an offer, perhaps, or maybe this was his plan all along. Maybe he only jailed them until he was ready to leave.”
I want to believe him, but the fear linger. What if he kept them somewhere else for the night? What if he chained them in an inn until he was ready to leave in the morning–a morning that never came?
What if we killed them?
The voices petitioning us from inside the bunker finally penetrate the fog of my mind. The rest of the caravan is still trapped inside. Starbucks tells everyone to huddle in a far corner. He takes my laser rifle and spends time burning a small corner of the building away, cutting it at a sharp angle until the rifle starts to overheat. He kicks aside the fallen concrete until a proper hole has been made.
The prisoners come blinking into the sunlight. They shake our hands and hug us and praise their gods. Starbucks warns them to keep their voices down. There are still zombies in the area. I look for Echo and Jarvis and Octavia, even knowing they’re gone. I have to confirm it. Milly and Jareth too. Milly was a shy, skinny young woman with brown hair and acne scars. Jareth was her husband, though they’d mostly kept to themselves. Aboard the caravan, I’d barely spoken to either.
The elation of the caravaners doesn’t touch us. I lean against the bunker in a desultory mood. Then it hits me.
Byron.
“Where’s Byron?” I demand.
That snuffs some of their joy.
“That bastard,” the burly caravan driver says. “He gave us up. We were fixin’ him. Fixin’ him good. Would’ve finished if the guards hadn’t taken him out. We boosted Cyn up to watch out the window. She said they took him up the road to a white building–that it there, Cyn?” he asks, pointing.
“Aye, that’s the one,” says another caravaner, a hunched older woman.
/> I’m already moving. The building is down a road we haven’t cleared yet, but my normal sense of caution is absent. The axe is in my hand. A roamer is drawn from a side-street. There’s a fierce satisfaction in splitting its head open. Starbucks follows, calling my name. He’s burning down others with the laser rifle. Three more fall to my axe before I reach the building.
It’s a medical facility for slaves. Healthy bodies fetch better prices, after all. The building is untouched by the fire. A robotic guard lies dead ten feet from the entrance, his body stomped into the mud, his head torn half-off. On his body is a key.
The door-lock clicks open.
Inside: cots and tools and machinery. Otherwise, it’s empty. No, wait–someone’s huddled in a far corner, knees drawn up to his chest.
Byron.
I barely recognize him. His eyes are swollen shut, his arm is in a cast, and his front teeth are missing. I have no sympathy. That part of me has closed its doors. Without his betrayal, we’d all be in Apolis right now. I don’t feel the conflict I might’ve felt in the past. It won’t feel like murder. It will feel like justice.
“Who’s there?” he asks, touching the wall beside him, pushing to his feet.
I stand in front of him. He asks again with fear in his voice.
“Tristan,” I say.
His jaw drops open.
“Tris– … Oh, thank God. Thank God … Where are the others?” he asks.
“I know it was you, Byron.”
He freezes.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“Say goodbye.”
I raise the axe.
“You’ll never find them without me!”
The words come out in a rush. I hesitate.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“Your girl. Echo. He took her, didn’t he? And some of the others. I’m not sure which ones, but I heard her for sure.”
“Keep talking.”
“They would’ve killed me, I think–the caravaners. But the Grass Man came. He didn’t come for me. It was just good timing. I heard the others being taken. Then the guards saw what they’d done to me. I blacked out. Woke up here. It’s all a misunderstanding, Tristan. I had nothing to do with it! How are you even here? What on Earth happened out there?”
“Where’s Echo?” I ask.
The caravaners have entered the building behind me. Starbucks is still outside, dealing with stray roamers. There’s an uproar when the survivors spot Byron. One throws him to the ground and kicks him. They want to finish the job. I have to yell for order. The burly driver seethes with anger, fists clenched, muscles trembling.
“Where’s Echo?” I ask again.
“Keep them off me,” Byron says.
“Where?”
“The Grass Man has her. But I can tell you how to find them. I’m–I’m your only chance, Tristan. Just get me out of here, leave me some supplies, let me live. I’ll tell you. I swear.”
The caravaners all try to talk at once. I quiet them, fingering the axe.
“Here’s the problem, Byron. You’re a liar. You’d say anything to live another day. But this is the end of your road. Right here, right now. I’m going to count backwards from five, and if you haven’t said anything useful by then, I’m going to plant this axe in your head.”
He waits until “one.”
“I planted a locator aboard his sled!” he says frantically.
“Nice try. Your locator was with the EMP in the caravan. Besides, the Grass Man left his sled at the z-line. It’s of no use.”
“No, no, his other sled. He kept one at each end of that tunnel–ask the others! The sleds are too big to fit through. I left the EMP in the wagon, yes. But not the locator. It was always with me. I had the transmitter; the Grass Man had the receiver. I got it from a guy in Boulderfield. He paid me, told me what to do. That’s how he found the caravan. But I kept the transmitter up my sleeve when the Grass Man caged me. I planted it on his sled when we reached Mudcross.”
I look around at the others. Their faces confirm the second sled, at least.
“Why would you bother planting the locator when you were already with the sled? Trying to find yourself?” I ask.
“I was hoping to escape. I didn’t want the Grass Man tracking me down again if I managed to get away. With the transmitter on the sled, I’d always know where he was.”
“But you didn’t have the receiver. What good is it to plant the transmitter without it?” I ask.
“None–unless you know the frequency, and you can find someone who can sell you a new receiver. I was planning to steal one from a shop in town–if I could ever escape, that is. It was a dim hope, I grant you, but what else could I do? I do know the frequency. What about you, Tristan? Know anyone good with electronics?”
I’d spoken of my hobby in the caravan. Byron’s hint of a smile is insufferable. It disappears when the burly driver, having perceived some change in the general mood, attempts to punch it from his face. I have to shout to restore order again. There are sounds outside too–we’re attracting more roamers, which Starbucks is still busy dispatching.
“Keep the animals off me, Tristan,” Byron says, standing again. He’s not smiling now.
“What’s the frequency?” I ask.
“Yeah, let me hand that over so you can kill me. I need assurances. I can’t bloody see. Keep me alive. We’ll go north, after the Grass Man. He’s sure to have gone that way. When the swelling goes down and I can see, I’ll give you the frequency. After that, you go your way, I’ll go mine. But you must promise now to leave me alive with a bare minimum of supplies. All I want is a chance. The Grass Man’s your real enemy. Not me.”
I pause, trying to think of a way around this.
“Why would you believe me even if I promised all that?” I ask.
“I’m a liar, Tristan. You’re right. But you’re not like me. You’re a slave to your own honor. I never understood honor. Mostly it gets people killed. But you’ll keep your word. I know that much. I did some rotten things, Tristan. But what’s more important–killing me or finding your friends?”
This is his strength. He’s sees what someone needs or fears, and he uses it to manipulate them. He mixes lies with truth and cares for neither. Worst of all, he’s right. I will keep my word. What’s to stop me from betraying him? Nothing but an outmoded sense of honor, yet that’s all it takes. Sometimes mental constructs can be stronger than physical ones. I don’t want to promise anything. I certainly don’t want to take him with us. But how else can we track down the Grass Man? Byron is too smart to give up the information for anything less. It’s his only bargaining chip.
Could I find the frequency on my own? It’s probably shortwave. It has to work over long distances. If I could find a good frequency scanner, maybe … but that’s unlikely in Mudcross. And a scanner might not pick it up. What if it only transmits a blip periodically, say every half an hour? I might never find it. Which means Echo and the others would be lost to us.
“One last magic trick, eh Byron?” I mutter.
He has the wits not to smile. I return the axe to my belt and drag him outside.
Love, Death, Robots, and Zombies Page 18
