Plague of the Undead (16 page)

They worked throughout the morning, gathering bird shit and bringing it back to their part of the encampment in the pockets of their clothes.

Within a few tries, Kelly got good at eyeballing the right amounts.

Two handfuls of bird shit mixed with a scant handful of sugar, cooked over coals in a cast-iron skillet, yielded a gray pancake-looking disc that needed to be dried under the sun, but otherwise looked to be exactly what they needed.

All they lacked was the right opportunity to deploy them.

It would have to be timed just right. Too soon, and they risked the chance that the herd could still be shepherded around the caravan’s hiding spot. Too late, and the zombies might not see them.

There was also the chance that the herd would pass them by in the middle of the night. That was what the Family wanted, Jacob was sure of that. The caravan would be dark, and quiet, and the herd would have nothing to draw them in. Morning would come with news from the riders that the herd had safely passed them by in the wee hours of the morning, with none of them the wiser.

It was a very real possibility, and one that would certainly write their death sentence if it happened; for Jacob knew, and had indeed heard rumblings from others, that Casey blamed him for the death of his wife and son. He had come begging for help, and while Jacob spoke truly that none of them had the medical knowledge needed to see his wife through the delivery, he was certain that Casey didn’t believe a word of it.

All he would need was the thinnest of excuses to kill Jacob and the others, if not for justice, but for some misplaced need for revenge. The short answer was that they needed the herd to come through the area at morning’s light.

Everything rested on that hope.

A curious quiet had descended on the camp.

Their evenings were usually filled with the yelling and laughing of the free men from the far side of the caravan. The Family liked to drink, and they got rowdy once the sun went down. But that evening was the first quiet one Jacob had heard. There was no singing, no fighting, no drunken fornicating. None of the normal noises. A sort of cowed quiet pervaded the community, as though everyone was stunned by the death of a mother and child and laid low by the surprise of it.

To Jacob, that seemed ironic.

He wondered how a people so eager to cause the deaths of others could be stunned by the death of one of their own.

It seemed like an exercise in hubris to him. But then, that didn’t shock him. Mother Jane and her Boys were barbarians. Surely they had no trouble believing the world revolved around them.

Yet, hadn’t he been the same, just a few days ago?

That thought caused him some disquiet. As a lifelong citizen of Arbella, he’d known a life of comfort and confidence that all around him shared the Code. And he’d gone forth into the wilderness believing that the Code would carry him through any situation, that it would be his spiritual guide. Yet, in the span of a few days, he’d stood by while a woman was raped and while another died in pregnancy. Did it matter that he was at gunpoint during the former, or technically unable to do much for the latter? He wanted to believe that it made a difference, but a part of him had doubts, especially about Bree’s death. Justly or unjustly, he couldn’t quite shake the idea that he was no better than these savages.

Wasn’t he just a brute of a different stripe?

Those were the thoughts that haunted him as he stood the first watch, straining his senses against the night, listening for some sign of the coming herd.

No sign came, and at the end of his three hours, he glanced from Kelly to Nick.

Nick was sleeping with an arm around Chelsea, and that made him frown. Since their early twenties, Jacob had more or less realized that Nick had a thing for the younger girls. Not the really young, not the little girls, because that would be sick and wrong, but for the girls on the edge of womanhood, around sixteen and seventeen.

Kelly had even noticed it. She’d seen the attention Nick lavished on Chelsea, and to her it was troubling.

“He likes ’em young,” Jacob said.

He’d meant simply to agree with her, but she’d gone on the offensive. “It’s not cool,” she said. “She’s a child. He has no business getting intimate with her. It’s . . . it just seems, I don’t know . . . ewww.”

His first instinct had been to defend his friend, but something made him stop short. It was a trend he’d first noticed right after they left school. At eighteen, they’d been farmed out as shadows to the various trades Arbella had to offer. Jacob had gone into salvage. Nick, because of his drawing ability and fantastic memory, had been pulled into the cartography school. Their evenings had been spent drinking and carousing with a bunch of girls just starting out in their new jobs. Jacob and Kelly had fallen together that first year out of school, and it had been fantastic. But Nick, Nick had remained fascinated with the younger girls still in school. At first, it was just the novelty of hanging out with the post-graduation kids that got him the girls, but as he got older, he got smoother, and soon at every party, every gathering, he had the latest cute girl from school on his arm.

That had gone on throughout their twenties without Jacob saying anything. After all, Arbella was a small community, and there simply weren’t that many available people with whom to have a sexual relationship. But by the time they’d entered their thirties, even Jacob had stopped thinking it cool that Nick always found some cute seventeen-year-old girlfriend to bring to the parties.

He’d never said anything, nor had anyone else, to Jacob’s knowledge, but Nick eventually stopped bringing the young ones around.

At the time, Jacob simply assumed Nick had finally grown up, and was going after girls his own age. But now, watching his friend with his arm over the girl’s shoulder and his body spooned up close to hers, he wondered.

He knelt down next to Nick and said, “Hey, buddy, time to wake up.”

Nick started and twisted around in his sleep. He blinked and then stared wide-eyed in alarm.

Beside him, Chelsea stirred.

“What’s up?” Nick said, through a cloud of sleep.

“Wake up, man,” said Jacob. “It’s your turn.”

“Huh?”

“For watch. It’s your turn.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah, I got it.”

“You got it? You sure?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, sitting up. He ran his fingers through his black hair. “Yeah, sure, I got it. Go to sleep, man. I’ll wake you if I hear anything.”

“You sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure,” he said. He yawned and stretched. “Go to sleep, man. I’ll wake Kelly next.”

And with that assurance, Jacob let himself drift off to sleep.

Jacob woke to sunlight on his face. It took him a moment to mentally drop into gear, but when he did, he sat up in a panic. Nick was asleep again, still pressed up against Chelsea’s backside. Kelly had curled up in a ball and pulled a frayed and muddy blue tarp over herself as a blanket.

He shook Kelly first, then Nick.

“Nick, what happened? Did you fall asleep?”

“Huh? What? Oh, crap. Oh, man, I’m sorry.”

“You’re . . . Crap!”

Jacob ran to the edge of the slave encampment and stared down the length of the caravan. Up near the road they’d used to come here from Sikeston he saw members of the Family walking in quiet groups, a horse-drawn trailer with a pair of bare pine wood coffins on it coming along behind the procession.

“Crap,” he muttered.

He ran back to the others. “The Family is going out to bury Casey’s wife.”

“Oh, no,” Kelly said. “That was our window.”

“I know.”

“So what do we do?”

Jacob listened, hoping beyond hope to hear at least the distant tramp and moan of the promised herd, but there was nothing. Only the sound of the wind whistling through the trees.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

“I don’t hear anything.” Kelly said.

“No dogs barking.” There were at least sixty that Jacob had seen around the caravan, and you could rely on there always being one or two barking at something, be it one of Mother Jane’s ravens or chasing after some kids or just out of boredom. He went to the other side of the caravan and looked toward the corral. There were horses there, but at least half were missing. “They must have sent riders out to shepherd the herd, and taken the dogs with them.”

“Nick, they said the herd was expected to pass east of town. What’s out that way?”

“According to the map, just open country.”

“And the town, how big is it? How far across?”

“Well, we’re to the northwest. Straight shot across Highway 60, it’d be about a mile and a half to the other side of town.”

“Okay, so not that far. If the herd was over there, and if they saw the smoke, we could see the first ones within, what, about thirty minutes?”

“Jacob,” Kelly said. The way she drew out his name, he could tell she thought he was grasping at straws.

“Do we have any other options?”

“I don’t know. That just seems like a mighty thin hook to hang our chances on.”

“When are we going to have a better chance, Kelly? Most of the Family is at least ten minutes away. They’ll be on foot. And most of the men who aren’t at the funeral are off guiding the herd. This is our best chance. We light the smoke, get some horses, and make a break for it. With any luck at all, we’ll be well south of here while the Family is trying to save themselves from the herd.”

Kelly had seemed excited about the plan the night before, but now that it came time to put it in motion, she looked absolutely ill.

Nick looked doubtful, too.

Only Chelsea seemed unperturbed. But then, he figured that made sense. Neither Nick nor Kelly had gotten used to life as a slave yet. Chelsea had. She had seen how brutal and nasty and short life as a slave could be. But for Nick and Kelly, and for Jacob, too, this all still felt like a horrible nightmare from which they still had a chance of waking.

“We have to do this, you guys,” Jacob said. “This is our last, best hope.”

He looked at his old friends, and gradually saw their resolve taking shape.

He stuck out his hand between them, the way they’d done back in school, and Nick smiled. He put his hand on top of Jacob’s, and Kelly followed a second later.

Nick gestured at Chelsea, and she did the same.

“All right,” Jacob said. “Let’s do this.”

Jacob, Nick, and Chelsea went around the caravan as discreetly as possible, planting the gray pancakelike smoke grenades in places where they wouldn’t be easily found.

Kelly was the best rider of the bunch, so she went to collect horses for them.

Jacob couldn’t believe how careless the Family was. Perhaps it was because they were so preoccupied with the funeral and the passing herd, but it shocked him that they had left the camp virtually deserted. And as he planted the last of his smoke grenades, he thought how very sad it was that none of the other slaves had thought to use the opportunity to escape. Maybe it was true that some people learn to love their chains.

He stood and walked to the edge of the caravan, trying to look like he was busy fixing something whenever a free man or woman would pass. Fifty feet to his left, Chelsea did the same. Up near the head of the caravan, Nick, too, was finished and waiting for the signal.

And then he saw Kelly step into view.

She gave him a nod, and he nodded back.

They’d each taken a box of matches from the pantry trailer Chelsea had shown them, and as Jacob drew a match and knelt down to light the first grenade, he couldn’t help but think of Sheriff Taylor. A flood of emotion came over him. Here, reduced to a simple stick of wood, was his George Washington, his Sam Houston. Everything he knew and valued and thought worthy of praise, could be summed up in this simple matchstick. Somehow it seemed overly simple and obscene to reduce such a great man to something so banal, and yet at the same time it seemed elegantly appropriate. Sheriff Taylor had literally meant the world to him, and now he was fit for burning.

For the first time since watching Sheriff Taylor die, Jacob felt like he was doing exactly what the grand old man would have done. There was a sharp scratch, and the blue spurt of the match catching, and he touched the flame to the grenade.

It began to hiss right away, and the flame caught a moment later.

Within seconds, a thick, gray, sulfurous-smelling smoke rose from the grenade, and as the flame spread, so did the smoke. Jacob ran to ignite the others, and within minutes, they had a full cloud of smoke rising from under the line of vehicles.

The quiet caravan turned into chaos. Slaves ran in every direction, most of them screaming, “Fire, fire, fire!” The few free men and women left in the encampment were no less frantic. They clearly had no plan for dealing with a fire, and after a confused few seconds falling all over each other, most ran to the open fields outside the caravan and turned to watch the thing burn.

Meanwhile Kelly came up with the horses. She stopped in front of them and handed off the reins.

“I found two rifles,” she said.

“Outstanding,” Jacob said, as he and Nick climbed onto their horses.

Only Chelsea was still on the ground.

“What’s wrong?” Nick asked.

She looked uncertainly at the huge animal standing by her side. It was already jittery from the foul-smelling smoke drifting across the field, and it was picking up Chelsea’s obvious fear. It beat at the ground with its front hooves and Chelsea let go of the reins and backed hurriedly away.

Kelly rode up beside the animal, grabbed the reins, and calmed it.

“Come on,” she said. “You have to get up.”

Nick jumped down from his horse and helped her up. “Just hang on,” he said. “Keep your knees tight against his sides. We’ll help you.”

As he was about to get back on his own horse, one of the slaves ran out from between two vehicles and tackled him. The man immediately started yelling for help, just as Chris Walker had done when he tackled Eli.

“Get off me!” Nick said.

“Fuck no!” the slave yelled. “Help! Help! They’re trying to escape!”

Nick twisted away from the man and jumped to his feet, but the slave wouldn’t give up. He charged Nick with his arms spread wide for another tackle. Nick stepped into the man’s charge and slammed his elbow down on the man’s face, shattering his nose.

The slave gave out and sank to the ground. But even with his face a bloody mess he refused to let go. He threw his arms around Nick’s knees and squeezed. Nick punched at the man. He drove his knees into the man’s face, but still the slave held on, like a drowning man clinging to a pier. Finally, Jacob dropped from his horse, slid one of the rifles Kelly had been able to steal from the saddlebags, and brought it down on the back of the slave’s head with a sharp crack.

The man collapsed, groaning, but still wouldn’t stop. He rose drunkenly to his feet and lunged for Nick, but Nick sidestepped the charge and the man tumbled into the front legs of Chelsea’s horse. The animal was still skittish from the smoke and immediately began stamping and punching at the man with his front hooves, catching the slave in the jaw with one of the strikes and snapping his neck like a twig. The man went down hard, arms and legs bent every which way and his head wedged over against the top of his shoulder. Blood ran from his mouth and nose, pooling in the grass beneath him.

Jacob and Nick both jumped onto their horses.

“You should have just shot the son of a bitch,” Nick said.

Before Jacob could respond, they saw more slaves gathering around them. “Oh, crap,” he said. Jacob turned his horse toward the head of the caravan and through gaps in the smoke saw free men with rifles running toward them, ducking behind cover every few yards as they came on. “They’re behind us, too.”

“Jacob, got a plan?” Nick asked.

“Not really.”

Smoke drifted into Jacob’s eyes and he turned his face away, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opened them, the slave with the broken neck was climbing to his feet, his head still tilted over at a painful looking angle.

“Oh, crap, we got problems,” Jacob said.

Nick looked back at Kelly. “You got her?”

Kelly had Chelsea’s horse by the reins. “I got her. You guys just find us a way out of here.”

“Let’s go this way,” Jacob said, directing them back through the maze of vehicles.

The smoke was thick. They kept bumping into things, and the horses were difficult to control. Waiting for them on the other side were two male slaves, both of them with big sections of metal pipe in their hands.

Jacob leveled his rifle, aiming for the head, and instead shot the first man in the neck, the other in the chest.

“Are we shooting now?” Nick asked.

“Might as well,” Jacob answered. “Not like we’re gonna give away our position.”

But then a gust of wind cleared away the smoke for an instant, and they saw the Family running toward the caravan from the road.

And Casey was leading the charge.

Jacob heard several shots and turned toward the head of the caravan. Free men with pistols and rifles were trying to get a bead on them through the smoke. On horseback, they made a target big enough for even an untrained shooter to hit.

“Come on, this way,” Jacob said, and turned them back toward the slave encampment.

Jacob took the lead. They charged into the slave encampment, blind in the clouds of smoke, only to find themselves crushing headlong into a mass of slaves. Snarling faces, twisted with rage and desperation, swarmed all around him. Hands clutched at him, pulling at his clothes. Jacob twisted and kicked and punched with the rifle, but there were too many of them. They finally managed to pull him from the horse and he fell into a wail of kicks and punches.

As he went down, he saw Nick and Chelsea pulled down as well, but once he hit the ground he threw his arms over his head and pulled his knees in tight to protect himself from the kicking.

And then the kicking stopped and Nick was pulling him to his feet.

“Come on, we gotta go.”

Bleeding and bruised all over, Jacob tried to make sense of what Nick was saying. His vision was a blur, but he saw Nick pointing to the west. Through a hazy screen of dissipating smoke Jacob had a view of a large group of zombies advancing through the tall grass, their feeding moans so loud they could be heard even over the gunfire the free men were directing toward them.

Jacob looked around for Kelly, but couldn’t see her. All he could see were zombies closing in, pulling slave and free man alike to the ground wherever they found them.

Through the drifting screens of smoke Jacob saw Casey climb to the top of an RV and pull Mother Jane up behind him.

“Nick!” he yelled. “We need to go up!”

There was another RV nearby and Jacob covered them with the rifle as Nick pushed Chelsea up to the roof. A zombie staggered toward him, smoke curling off its back. Behind it were three more, coming up fast.

“Nick, hurry!”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

Jacob raised his rifle and fired into the advancing zombies. He dropped two, but only winged a third. It spun halfway around and stopped walking, but then turned his direction, straightened, and stumbled forward again, its left arm hanging limp as a flag from a nasty shoulder wound.

“Jacob, get up here!”

He glanced to the roof of the RV and saw Nick with his hand stretched down to him. Jacob slung the rifle over his shoulder and caught Nick’s hand.

Nick pulled him up to the roof just as a crowd of the undead clutched at his feet. Jacob kicked their hands away, gave it one last push, and landed hard on the RV’s metal roof.

He rolled over onto his back and caught his breath. “Damn, that was close,” he said.

Nick laughed. “You ain’t kidding, brother.”

Jacob got to his feet. The smoke grenades were starting to burn out, and big gaps in the smoke clouds started to appear. The crowd of zombies surrounding their RV was large, but there were many gaps in their number. They seemed to have gathered around a number of trailers and RVs, wherever the living had taken to the roof for shelter. Looking across the line of vehicles, he caught another glimpse of Casey and Mother Jane. They were both busy pulling members of the Family onto the roof of their RV, which was filling with people. Looking off to his left, toward town, he saw the main body of the herd coming down the highway. It was a black river of bodies that spread out to the horizon.

Moving through the zombies crowded around their RV Jacob saw several members of the Family. They were trying to find a way up, and a few were trying to get up on their RV, including Hank and a few free women he was trying to rescue.

“Help me!” Hank said, extending a hand up to Jacob. He was holding on to the sides of the trailer, already halfway up.

Jacob glanced at Nick, and an understanding passed between them.

He leaned over the side and met Hank’s desperate gaze.

“Help me!”

Jacob kicked his hand, causing him to slide back to the ground with a scream of pain.

Zombies closed in on the noise, narrowing their circle around him.

“What are you doing?” Mother Jane screamed at them. “Help that man!”

Jacob made a point to meet her gaze, and then he kicked Hank in the face, knocking him flat on his back.

These zombies, the first of the herd to descend on their encampment, were the freshest and fastest of the bunch. When they attacked, they were vicious predators, snarling and tearing like dogs in a fight. They ripped into Hank with their teeth and fingernails, pulling him apart in seconds, his screams echoing over the roaring moans of the herd.

Other free men and women were trying to climb up as well. Nick and Jacob went around the edge of the RV, smashing with their rifles any free man or woman trying to gain the roof.

And then a smoke cloud dissipated and Kelly was there with the horses. She motioned for them to hurry.

There was still a gap in the herd, Jacob saw. They could make it.

“We have to go now,” he said to Nick.

“How?” Nick said. “There’s too many of them.”

“It’s now or never. Do it!”

Nick nodded. He waited for the zombies to fall on yet another member of the Family, and then slid down the side of the RV. He turned and motioned for Chelsea with an
I’ll catch you
gesture.

When Chelsea was down in his arms, Jacob turned to see what was happening with Mother Jane and Casey. The two of them were staring daggers at him.

He gave them both a
Go fuck yourself
sign with his fingers and slid down the side of the RV. A zombie lashed out at him, but he managed to grab its arm, catch the back of the zombie’s right foot with a sharp kick of his left leg, and sweep the dead man’s feet out from under him.

The zombie landed flat on his back, but Jacob didn’t stick around to continue the fight. He jumped to his feet and ran for the horses Kelly had managed to hold on to.

Once he was mounted, the group turned to the south and took off.