The Crossing: A Zombie Novella (6 page)

This was apparently Will and Frank’s secret, for Will led us down to a cross street very close to the greenbelt. It was dark and the streets were lit only by starlight. I could see very little, but I could hear the zombies moaning, and they were getting closer every minute.

Will leaned down and whispered into Guthrie’s ear.

For the dog this was clearly some kind of game. It began to bark and spin around in a circle, like it was chasing its own tail, sending the music of bells into the night.

The bells were answered by a chorus of moans that seemed to come from all around us at once.

“
What in the world are you - ”

But I didn’t get to finish my objection. Will put up a hand and motioned at the dog. Guthrie sprinted forty yards or so down the street, right into the face of a growing crowd of zombies, and began to bark.

“
What’s he - ”

“
Shhh,” Will said. “Don’t make a sound.”

Zombies poured out of the buildings, so many in fact that for a moment I lost sight of Guthrie. But then he reappeared, still barking furiously, the bells on his harness like Christmas music in the cold night air, and he sprinted away.

My pulse quickened. The zombies were actually following him. This just might work.

But then he stopped. He turned and watched the zombies, almost like he was waiting for them to catch up.

“
Go,” I whispered. “Come on you stupid dog. Run!”

“
No,” Will said. He turned his palm toward me without moving his arms. “No sudden movements. They key on movement and noise. Just wait. Guthrie knows what to do.”

And he was right.

The dog was good at what he did, and I began to see why Weimar had the reputation that it did. Within a few minutes, Guthrie had managed to lead all the zombies away from our position with an air of practiced efficiency that would have been the envy of any Border collie. I heard him barking in the distance, apparently happy as a clam.

“
He’ll be okay?” I asked.

“
He’s a dog,” Will said. “Why wouldn’t he be?”

I couldn’t deny the sense in that.

When the zombies were gone, Will led us down to the bottom of the greenbelt and began pulling away vegetation. I looked over at Jessica, hoping maybe to catch a glimpse of what was going through her mind. She had grown quiet since we left the campsite, and that bothered me. But she neither returned my glance nor gave any indication that she was anxiously waiting on Will’s next move. She just stood there, patient as a saint, a strange, almost vacant acceptance on her face. She seemed to have gone robotic, much as she had been in the truck with Jake and the two brothers.

“
This is it,” Will said. He stepped back to reveal an open standpipe, a gigantic open maw, like the opening to a cave. “Go through here. When you come up on the other side, you’ll be in Free America.”

“
Just like that?” I asked.

“
Yep. Pretty much.”

Again I looked at Jessica. I wanted some indication that she was okay with this, but all I got was a blank stare. She turned away from me, ducked her head, and slipped into the standpipe.

“
Jessica, wait,” I said.

Only then did she turn to look at me.

“
What?”

“
You’re okay with this?”

She shrugged. I’ll never forget that. There was no expression, just a vacant shrug. She turned into the darkness of the tunnel and started walking. Will gave me an encouraging nod, and the next instant I walked into the tunnel, trying to catch Jessica.

The crossing itself was anticlimactic.

We entered a pipe about five feet in diameter, so I had to duck slightly to move through it, and began to feel our way forward.

There was about an inch of standing water in the bottom of the pipe, and every step made a splash that echoed down the length of the tube. It was dark, too. Even though Jessica was only an arm’s length ahead of me, I couldn’t see her.

It would have been the perfect setting for something scary, for every sound really did send reverberations away from us in both directions, but the truth is, I felt completely safe the whole way.

The crossing itself was a piece of cake.

I don’t know how long we walked. A couple of minutes maybe. But eventually we came up on the other side. I saw some shrubs, a patch of starlit sky, and then we were out, standing on the grass.

We had arrived in Free America.

But it was not the joyful homecoming I’d expected. I looked around. Something was wrong. The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. But what was the problem? What was wrong?

There was a street off to our left and abandoned buildings, shop fronts mostly, on the other side of that. A cold breeze blew dust across the pavement. I heard moans in the distance, and even though all else seemed quiet, my gut told me we were in real trouble.

Jessica stepped into the street, looking back toward the quarantine wall.

A Quarantine Authority truck rolled down IH-10, moving slowly.

It came to a stop.

“
Oh no,” Jessica said.

“
What’s going on?” The truck was maybe a hundred yards away, which was close, but in the dark, I thought there was a chance they hadn’t seen us.

The truck started to pull away, and I thought: Good! Yes. Keep going.

“
Jessica,” I said, “they’re leaving!”

She turned to me and shook her head. “We have to get out of here,” she said.

“
But they’re driving off.”

It was true. The truck was accelerating away. It went down the highway a few hundred yards, and then suddenly its brake lights came on and it veered off the main lanes and back towards our position.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The truck bounced over the median, crossed a parking lot, and then accelerated down a surface street that would carry it around behind us.

“
How did they...?” I asked.

“
Hurry,” Jessica said. “Across the street.”

“
Where?”

“
Those buildings.” She pointed to the shop fronts across the street. “Hurry.”

I ran.

I made it all the way across before I realized Jessica was still standing in the middle of the street.

“
Jessica?”

“
You need to go,” she said. “Get out of sight.”

“
What are you doing?”

“
I can’t go with you.”

The truck was getting closer. I could hear its engine pulling hard. And something else. Voices, the sound of boots on the pavement. Men running. Someone shouted orders.

“
Like hell. Come on, Jessica.”

“
No, I can’t.”

“
What do you mean you can’t?”

She looked utterly deflated, miserable. “I can’t go with you.”

I could make out individual voices now and the clatter of equipment and guns. The soldiers were seconds away.

“
But Jessica...?”

“
That world doesn’t exist for me anymore. It’s all changed. I’ve changed. You can’t go home again. Isn’t that what you said?”

“
Jessica, I – ”

“
Don’t,” she said. “There isn’t time. I can’t go with you, and I can’t go back. But you need to hide. Now!”

The truck came roaring around a corner halfway down the block. I was out of time. I had to act. There was a narrow alleyway between two buildings a few steps away. I backed into it, into the shadows.

Out in the street, Jessica stood her ground.

From my research on the Quarantine Authority I knew they’d have helicopters over the area in just a few minutes. They’d have heat sensing cameras and all sorts of sophisticated people-hunting equipment to bring into play, which meant I had only seconds to get away.

But I couldn’t look away from Jessica. Quarantine Authority troopers bore down on her, yelling for her to get down on her knees, while the truck skidded to a stop on the other side of her and hit her with a super-intensity floodlight.

I anticipated the gun shot, but when it came, I flinched just the same.

I turned and ran, tears streaming down my face, and as I slipped away into the night I realized the woman had given her life for my escape, and I never even knew her last name.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four part Dead World series, Quarantined, and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and in Dating in Dead World and Other Stories. For more information go to
http://joemckinney.wordpress.com

We hope you enjoyed
The Crossing
. Joe McKinney and Print Is Dead will reteam in April of 2012 for
Dating in Dead World: The Collected Zombie Stories, Volume One
.

Read on for exciting previews of other thrilling Print Is Dead titles…

PREVIEW

PRAY TO STAY DEAD: A ZOMBIE NOVEL

By Mason James Cole

1974.

The Summer of Love is a fading memory, the Cold War rages on, Richard M. Nixon is barely holding onto the Presidency, and the dead are returning to life.

Five friends on their way to a week at Lake Tahoe, a Vietnam veteran in Sacramento trying to get home to his daughter in New Mexico, an older couple idling in a dusty shop in the hills, and a dangerous man who has spent twenty years preparing his strange family for the end of the world...

As civilization collapses, these scattered survivors cross paths, and the hungry dead are the least of the horrors unleashed.

Those who die will walk.

Those who live will hope for a quick death, and they will
pray to stay dead
.

"A brutally entertaining collision of zombie thriller and grindhouse action. Not for the faint of heart!"

Jonathan Maberry,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Patient Zero
and
The Dragon Factory

“
Pray to Stay Dead
 
is a revelation, one of those books that reminds you why you liked the genre in the first place… buy it, buy it, buy it.”

Alex Riviello, BADASS DIGEST

“
Jesus,” he said, leaning across the counter and looking Eddie Proust in the eye. “This is a bad idea, man. You’re messing up big time.”

“
This is America is what it is,” Proust said, sliding his holstered gun onto his belt. “A lot might be changing out there, but that hasn’t.”

“
Damn,” Cardo said, putting the customer service desk between himself and the entrance. Proust’s boys carried shotguns in plain sight of the people pressed against the glass storefront. They’d paraded them around for the last five minutes, after Proust let them know the doors were opening in ten. He’d given the crowd time to spread the word.

“
Open up,” Proust said a few minutes later, and his son did. They filed in, giving the shotgun a wide berth, looking around, eyes wide. There was a Proust family member stationed the head of every aisle, each carrying a gun.

“
Hey, Troy,” Eddie Proust said as Troy Matthews walked by and picked up a can of kerosene. Proust smiled as if it were any old day. Matthews looked dazed. There was a spot of blood on his cheek.

Bodies pressed in, and Cardo backed away. Tasgal and Clark were outside. He saw flashes of them between the jostled forms pouring into the store. They wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing. Cardo looked behind him, down the empty aisle and toward the back of the store. Wouldn’t be long now before someone noticed the prices.

“
Oh, come on, Eddie,” a short man with close-cropped red hair and a nose that seemed too small for his face yelled, indignant. “This is ridiculous.”

“
I’m sorry, Keith, it’s just business,” Proust said, speaking to the short man in the same tough-luck tone he probably used on folks who tried to get a refund on an open box of detergent. “You know as well as I do that the trucks aren’t coming anytime soon. This is—”

Everyone yelled at once, and then the little redhead lifted his arm. There was a muffled pop, and the back of Eddie Proust’s head flapped open as if on a spring-loaded hinge. The crowd surged. By the time the air filled with the thundering chorus of gunfire, Cardo was halfway to the back of the store.