Plague of the Undead (6 page)

Kelly greeted him at the door with a Mason jar full of her homemade gin in her hand. “Welcome, stranger,” she said. “You thirsty?”

“God, yes.”

“Barry,” Kelly yelled into the house. Her home was lit by the warm buttery glow of dozens of candles and filled with the chatter and laughter of a small dinner party. “The boss wants a drink.”

“On it!” Barry called from the kitchen.

“Here’s a towel. You can put your umbrella over there, but leave your boots outside. I don’t want you tracking mud in my house.”

The other members of the expedition were already crammed in around the Banises’ dining room table. There was a chair open at the head of the table, opposite Taylor’s chair. Barry stuck a gin and tonic in his hand and pointed him toward the open chair.

“Welcome, boss.”

“Thanks, Barry.”

Jacob sat down at the head of the table. The others were still talking amongst themselves. Only Taylor was watching him, another matchstick tucked securely in the corner of his mouth.

“You’re late,” Taylor said.

“I was figuring out the ammunition inventory with Steve. Looks like we’re only gonna be able to bring about forty rounds each. The rest has to stay here to leave enough to defend the walls.”

“Only forty rounds?” Barry said. “That’s not enough, is it?”

Jacob shrugged. “It’s what we’ve got to work with.”

“Can’t we gather some, you know, while we’re outside the walls?” The question came from Bree Cheney, the gorgeous, bubbly blonde Nick Carroll had recommended for the post of medic. Her job at the Peach Orchard Farm was that of veterinarian, which meant she’d be able to help out with the horses, but she’d also been shadowing Dr. Gary Williams for a few years now, and by all accounts she was very good at what she did. Though clearly, from her question, salvage was not her bag.

Jacob glanced to Frank Hartwell, the engineer for the expedition and Jacob’s old boss back when he was working with the salvage teams, figuring he’d want to answer that. Hartwell was a strong, bulky man of fifty. His hair was graying at the temples, but his full beard remained perfectly black. At first he’d refused coming on the expedition, saying that he was too old, but he was one of the most levelheaded men Jacob knew, and nobody in town could match his knowledge of the wasteland, and in the end, Jacob had insisted.

Hartwell nodded and churched his fingers together in front of his lips. “It’s certainly possible that we could find some ammunition while we’re out, but you can’t hang much hope on that. The chance of finding the right caliber, for instance, is remote at best. It’s possible we could stumble on a gun store or a sporting goods store that hasn’t been looted down to the floor tiles, but not all that likely. And even if we did find a pile of the right caliber ammunition at one of those places, the stuff is going to be thirty years old. It’s had plenty of time to rust and corrode. It might not even fire anymore. Or worse, it might blow up in our face.”

“So what’s the alternative?” Kelly said. “I mean, forty rounds apiece isn’t much if we find ourselves in a bad mess, right?”

Several of the others started talking at once.

Taylor rapped his knuckles on the table and that quieted down the room. “Leave it all here.” He nodded to Jacob. “Tomorrow, when you talk to Steve, tell him all the ammo stays here for civil defense.”

Nobody spoke. There were nervous glances around the table.

“All of it?” Jacob said. “You’re sure?”

“I am,” Taylor said. “And don’t worry, I got us covered. Shortly after you got the council’s permission to organize this trip I went to Billy Evans over at the machine shop and asked him to gather up all the damaged shell casings he could find. He got a whole mess load of ’em from the school’s shooting range and he’s been retooling them ever since. I’m told he’s reloaded enough to give us seven hundred rounds apiece.”

“Seven
hundred
?” said Barry. “You’re kidding. That’s amazing.”

“Well, most of us will have fourteen boxes of fifty rounds each.” Taylor pointed at Eli Sherman and Max Donavan, two groomers from Walter Mayfield’s livery. Neither man had turned twenty yet, but both were known to be equally good with horses, fists, and rifles. They were along for muscle, mainly, and to help Bree Cheney care for the horses. “You two,” Taylor said. “I’m told both you men are crack shots. That true?”

The two men stiffened.

“Uh, yes, sir,” they both stammered as one.

“Good. I set aside a thousand rounds each for the two of you.”

Eli and Max looked at each other with equal parts delight and shock. The notion that the Great Sheriff Taylor had just publicly complimented them had left them both a little starstruck.

“I expect you’ll make every round count.”

“Yes, sir!” Eli said.

And from Max: “You can count on it, sir.”

“Good.” Taylor glanced across the table to Jacob. “And, what’s more, Billy tells me he was able to make the rounds subsonic.”

Jacob’s eyebrows went up.

“What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

“Slower than the speed of sound,” Eli said, and slapped Max on the shoulder as the two shared a grin.

Bree gave him the finger. “I know what subsonic means, you little jerk. I mean why is it important that a bullet is subsonic?”

Jacob started to answer, but Frank Hartwell interrupted. His tone was quiet and patient, and to Jacob at least, who knew how gruff the man could be in the field, it was pretty obvious he had taken a shine to Bree.

“When you fire a gun,” he said, “it sounds like it makes one loud bang, but it actually makes two. The first is the explosion that happens when the firing pin hits the detonator and the charge explodes. The second one, the loud crack that carries for miles, is the sonic boom that comes with the bullet breaking the sound barrier.”

“So it’ll be like having a silencer or something?” Bree asked.

“Not quite,” Frank said. “But at least the sound won’t carry for miles. It’s definitely a good thing, even if it does decrease the range of our weapons a bit.”

That brought appreciative smiles and nods from the others around the table. Jacob felt relieved as well, but he was troubled by the way Taylor had chosen to unveil his information. Jacob had shared everything with Taylor. He’d held nothing back, but clearly information wasn’t flowing both ways. If they were supposed to be coleaders of this expedition, this wasn’t the best kind of start Jacob could think of.

He felt like he had to retake control of the meeting.

“Is everybody ready to begin?” he asked the group.

Nods all the way around the table. The mood had turned light again.

Jacob surveyed the group. “So, this is what I want to do tonight. Most of you know each other quite well, or at least know of each other. That’s good. But I want to lay out officially why you’re all here and what you’ll be doing. I thought we’d go around the table and introduce ourselves.”

Jacob turned to Nick seated at his right.

“You want to start us off?”

“Uh, sure,” Nick said. “So, yeah, I’m Nick Carroll. I draw pretty good, so they hired me on to make maps.” He looked at Jacob with his patented wicked grin and shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess that’s about it.”

Jacob shook his head. “Don’t let him fool you, folks. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Nick here actually has a brain. Most of you probably know already that he’s pretty good at drawing, but he’s also got a thing for maps, so I’m hiring him on as our cartographer. On top of that, he’s got some expertise outside the wall. Sheriff Taylor and I have worked closely with him, and with Frank over there, to figure out our route, which we’re gonna go over here in a sec.”

He turned to Kelly. “You want to go next?”

Kelly smiled at the room. “I know most of you already. I’m Kelly.” She gave a little wave. “This is my husband, Barry.” Barry dutifully raised his hand in a drunken salute. “We supervise production and research over at Howth Farm, which I guess makes us as close to botanists as anybody you’re gonna find here in this town. Obviously, we won’t be able to carry all the food we need for the trip, so our job will be to tell you what stuff is safe to eat. Also, we’re going to be doing frequent soil samples for CDHL levels.” She gave Nick’s shoulder a pat. “We’ll be tabulating our data with Nick here, and hopefully, after we’re done, we’ll know the right direction for expansion.”

“Excellent.” Jacob pointed to Kelly’s right and said, “Frank . . .”

“Yeah. Thanks, Jacob. Okay. My name is Frank Hartwell. I was Jacob’s boss about ten years ago, before he went off and left me for the law. My specialty is salvage. I take what’s gone bad and make it new again. At least in theory. I’ll be working with Jacob and Sheriff Taylor to see if there’s anything we encounter out in the wasteland that Arbella can use.”

“Like what?” asked Max.

Frank shrugged. “Well, anything. Motors, gasoline, door knobs.”

“Door knobs?” Max said.

“A joke, son. The point is we have no idea what might prove valuable. I’ve been collecting a list of requests, and we’ll try to find that stuff, but salvage is all about thinking out of the box. There’s no telling what can be repurposed into what. You just take it as it comes.”

“Yeah, but it’s a question of who takes it, if you know what I mean. I didn’t sign on to carry a bunch of junk all over the wasteland.”

Frank turned in his chair and looked like he was about to read the kid the riot act. Jacob stepped in before that had a chance to happen. “It doesn’t work that way, Max,” he said. “When you do salvage like this, if it’s something there’s no way you can carry, you just record the location of the find, hide it or disguise it if you can, and then report back to town for the proper resources to go back out and get it. We don’t have a whole lot of gas, but we’ve got enough to power a truck to go out and bring something back, provided it’s worth it.”

Max mulled that over. “So, I’m not gonna be carrying a bunch of junk all over zombie country, right?”

“Right,” Jacob said. “We’re not bringing you along as a pack mule, don’t worry.”

“Oh. Well, okay then.”

They worked their way through the rest of the introductions—Owen Webb, anthropologist; Andy Dawson, the town’s main reporter—before Jacob ordered the table cleared so they could unveil a giant map of Missouri.

“Nick,” Jacob said, “you want to start us off?”

Nick cleared his throat. “Yeah, you bet.” He ran a finger down the right side of the map. “Obviously, this is the river, and this bend here, where it says New Madrid, that’s us. The first leg of the journey is to take Highway 55 here up to where it meets Interstate 55. From there, we’ll follow the interstate up to Sikeston. We’re figuring that should take about a week.”

“A week?” said Andy Dawson. “Why a week? That looks like a straight shot to me. What is it, about thirty miles?”

Andy was a talented carpenter. He’d actually rebuilt the front steps of Jacob’s mother’s house, which is why Jacob thought of him for this expedition—though not in his capacity as carpenter, but as a journalist. On the recommendation of David Sachs, Jacob had read the
Journals of Lewis and Clark
and had come away with an appreciation for the fact that they were going to need someone to chronicle the expedition. Jacob could barely force himself to write a full police report, much less something book length, so he’d turned to Andy Dawson, one of four part-time journalists for the Arbella
Weekly News
.

“It’s closer to fifty miles,” Jacob said. “But it’s hard country. I remember there were places so overgrown that you couldn’t even tell where the highway used to be. You’d see these big eighteen-wheelers standing in the middle of a sea of grass like shipwrecks and that was about the only clue there was ever a road there.” Jacob glanced across the table at Frank Hartwell. “You’ve been out there recently. Is it still that bad?”

“It’s gotten a lot worse, actually,” said Frank. “Once nature starts taking over, the rate of encroachment speeds up exponentially every year. In some places the grass grows shoulder high. Fires happen every once in a while, usually near the end of summer, so there won’t be that much scrub brush to contend with, but the grass and the sunflowers come back pretty fast, especially after a rainy spring like we’ve had. It may not look all that far, but we’ll need that week.”

“And remember,” Jacob said. “This isn’t a race. We’re doing this to get a good look around. I want to take our time, give everybody a chance to get used to living on the trail.”

“What about zombies?” Bree asked. She looked around the table nervously.

“There’s always a chance,” Frank said, his baritone softening just a little. He pointed to Sikeston on the map. “I was up in these parts about three years ago, and we ran into a herd of seven of them. And then there’s the really big herd that Jacob fought back last month. So, yeah, they’re out there. We’ll have to be on our toes.”

“What do we do if we see them?”

“Just fall back on the training you got in school,” Frank said. “We avoid them as long as we can, and we only fight them if we absolutely have to.”

“Silent running is the rule here,” Jacob added. “I want you guys to take this first week to acclimatize yourself to life in the wasteland. Get comfortable on the trail. But keep in mind that comfortable is not the same thing as having a party out there. We’ll exercise noise discipline the entire time we’re outside the wall. Use the hand signals you were taught in school whenever possible. Talk only when necessary, or when it’s obvious we’re alone. But if you do talk, do so quietly. Remember: Anything can happen, and it often does.”

Bree glanced down at the map, clearly nervous.

“Look,” said Frank, softening his voice another notch, “we’re not trying to scare anybody. I think you’ll find, once you get out there, that the wasteland isn’t all that bad. Parts of it are, yeah, but most of it is actually kind of beautiful. The fish have made a tremendous comeback, for example. There are streams so thick with trout you could almost walk on their backs to cross to the other side. Plus”—he drew an imaginary circle on the map with his index finger—“this part in through here is all a known element. We’ve been exploring it for years, so I’m not planning on any huge surprises.”