Dead Earth: The Green Dawn (6 page)

Oh, that sounded promising.

“What was it?” Fiona said.

Renee shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what happened?” Jubal felt
the first flares of panic in the back of his mind.

“I know what happened,” she said. “I just
don’t know what a fucking quantum bomb is. It doesn’t matter. They
couldn’t make it work.”

The woman closed her eyes and drew in a deep
breath. She didn’t speak.

“It’s okay,” Fiona said. “She does this
sometimes.”

Jubal rocked back and forth on his toes. He
wanted to grab her and shake her awake, to demand answers, to find
someone to blame. But he stood there with his fists clenched at his
sides.

“Renee?” Fiona said. “Are you still with
us?”

The yellow and red eyes opened again. She
stared at Jubal for at least a full minute. “You’ve seen them,
haven’t you?” she said. “The dead army.”

“What? No—”

“Yes. In your dreams. Just like her.” She
nodded to Fiona.

His dreams? Two nights ago he had dreamed,
but he didn’t remember much. Something about a figure in red, maybe.
And this morning, hadn’t there been a dark group of figures marching
across the desert, like—

A dead army.

He looked at Fiona.

She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

Jubal shook his head. Two or three people
dreaming the same thing wasn’t possible. He didn’t believe it.

“Forget about my dreams,” he said. “What’s
the dead army?”

“First I have to tell you about the lab,”
Renee said. “About the work.” Her face glistened in the low-wattage
light from the lamp on the end table. As he stared at her, Jubal
could see blisters swell and burst, leaking yellow fluid. She didn’t
seem to notice. He wondered if she even felt it at this stage of
her illness.

“Do you know anything about string theory?”
Her voice had lost a little volume. He had to strain to hear.

“I thought you weren’t a scientist,” he
said.

She tried to smile, which caused further
cracking of the skin on her lips. Blood oozed out from the new
wounds.

“I’m not. But I’m not a dummy, either. A lot
of the folks at the lab talked. And I listened.”

“String theory has something to do with
gravity and black holes, right?” Fiona said.

“You’re teacher’s pet today,” Renee Spencer
said. “It does, indeed, concern black holes and gravity and quantum
physics. Imagine a guitar string stretched across all of space and
time, connecting everything there is. Now imagine playing different
notes on that string, accessing different times and different
universes.”

“That’s string theory?” Jubal said.

“Hell, no. I’ve barely given you the outline
of the outline. I don’t understand all of it myself. And I don’t
think I have a lot of time left to explain it, do I? No, don’t
bother to answer. I can see it in your eyes. I can feel it, too. So
let’s get to the point.

“When the scientists at Project Magellan
tried to build their little quantum bomb, I
think
they were
trying to develop something that would explode over an enemy force
and just send them...somewhere else. They couldn’t get it right,
though. But one failure leads to another discovery, and they found
a way to build a gate.”

“What kind of gate?” Jubal said.

Renee coughed up blood, runny with pus. Fiona
wiped Renee’s lip with a tissue. The coughing grew worse, becoming
a hack that Jubal thought would never stop. But finally it did.

“Renee?” Jubal said.

“I don’t know what kind of gate, but it sure
wasn’t made of white pickets.” She laughed weakly at her own joke,
then coughed some more. The woman breathed shallowly, her eyes
fluttering.

“I...in the control room when...it
happened.”

Renee swallowed repeatedly. Discolored drool
ran from her lip. A boil on her neck burst, the liquid running onto
a bath towel that Fiona had placed beneath the woman’s head.

“Explosion. Yellow...smoke. Or mist.”

Jubal and Fiona waited expectantly.

“Screams. Terrible screams,” Renee said,
gulping her words. She continued, her voice growing fainter as she
spoke. “I ran to my car. I ran faster than I’ve ever run in my
life. There were more explosions, terrible ones, but I got out of
there. Then...”

“Yes?” Jubal said, pitying the poor wreck, no
longer aware of the worsening smell of decay and sickness.

“The rest is...hazy. My car broke down, so I
hitchhiked anywhere to get away. Got sick. So sick. So...”

Renee’s eyes closed. Her breath hitched in
her throat.

“The dead army,” Jubal said. “Tell us about
the dead army.”

Her eyes opened to yellow-red slits.

“Your dreams...are real.”

Jubal turned to Fiona. “What does that mean?
My dreams are real?”

“Just what she said, Jubal. She thinks
there’s an army tromping around somewhere. An army of...the
dead.”

“What?”

Fiona nodded, her arms crossed, looking very
serious.

A burst of laughter erupted from Jubal. The
laughter continued for some time until he noticed the tears on
Fiona’s face.

“Shit. I’m sorry,” he said, wrapping his arms
around his fiancée and patting her back. “I just find it hard to
believe; I mean, c’mon. Zombies? Maybe ‘dead army’ just means the
US Army is out rounding up the dead from this epidemic.”

Fiona’s head shook on Jubal’s shoulder. “You
heard her. She had the same dream that I had. And that you had; I
know you had it—I saw it in your eyes when she mentioned it.
Something weird is definitely going on, and I’m so scared,
Jubal.”

Jubal held her tighter and let her cry into
his shirt. He happened to glance over her shoulder at Renee.

“Oh, shit.”

Fiona pulled away. “What?”

Jubal went to the woman on the couch and
stared into her face.

“Renee’s dead.”

“How do you know for sure? Feel her
pulse.”

“Hell, no. I ain’t touching her. But I know
dead when I see it, and she’s dead.”

“What’ll we do, Jubal? What is going on?”

“Let’s go to the kitchen. You can get some
coffee brewing, and we’ll think this thing through.”

They both shambled into the kitchen like lost
souls. Jubal was beginning to feel numb from too little sleep and
too much drama. He felt as if the world around him had become
surreal, as if he were walking through some strange nightmare
version of Serenity.

I hope I’m not having a nervous breakdown.
Not now, when everyone needs me.

Then he thought of his dad, and Damon. They
would never panic in a situation like this. At least he liked to
think they wouldn’t. But he doubted if they’d ever had to deal with
an emergency of this magnitude.

Jubal pulled out a chair at the kitchen table
and slumped into it. He watched Fiona go to the counter upon which
sat the coffee maker. As she swung a cabinet door open for the can
of coffee, her hair swung aside for a moment and Jubal glimpsed a
lump on her neck.

“So, what are we going to do with Renee,
Jubal?”

The sight of the blister or boil on Fiona’s
neck had stricken Jubal silent. He couldn’t tell her about his plan
to burn Renee’s body somewhere in the surrounding desert.

“Did you hear something in the other room
just now?” Fiona said.

He
had
heard something...

There was a moaning sound, then Renee Spencer
lurched into the room, arms outstretched, heading straight for
Fiona. She made a whining sound as if she were in pain...or
hungry.

Fiona screamed and sidestepped out of Renee’s
path.

But she was dead. I could have sworn...

Renee swung around toward Fiona. She made an
angry sound from the back of her throat. Jubal could see her eyes
now. There was no light there; there was nothing. Yet this dead
woman was in Fiona’s kitchen, attacking her.

Jubal leapt out of his chair and punched
Renee in the stomach. The undead woman let out a surprised grunt
and tumbled backwards onto the tile floor.

Oh my god. She looks dead. She smells dead.
She looks dead. She smells—-

Renee was on her feet again and Fiona was
still screaming in the corner of the kitchen. Jubal grabbed Fiona’s
sleeve and yanked her toward the doorway.

As Fiona was pulled across the room, Renee
clawed at her but missed.

Renee emitted a hunger-fueled wailing that
chilled Jubal to the bone.

He yanked his Glock and shot the undead woman
in the stomach.

Then Jubal and Fiona fled across the living
room and out the front door, slamming it closed behind them.

Jubal opened the passenger door of the
cruiser and pushed Fiona into the car. Then he ran around to his
side as Fiona swung her door closed. Jubal got in and switched on
the radio.

Fiona was whimpering like a baby.

“Sh, baby, shh,” Jubal said as he tried to
raise the state police. But all he got was static and hum.

“Shit!”

Jubal started the cruiser.

Fiona screamed. Jubal turned his head and,
through Fiona’s window, saw Renee lurching down the front walk, her
shirt spattered with blood. She reached out toward the cruiser with
outstretched arms and groping fingers, her jaw working up and
down.

“Quiet, baby. We’re getting out of here.”

The cruiser tore off down the street, leaving
the hungry zombie behind.

Fiona would not stop screaming. He’d seen
hysterical people slapped in movies, but couldn’t bring himself to
hurt Fiona—ever. Even if it was for her own good.

Halfway to the sheriff’s house, Fiona’s
screams died down to sobs.

“Don’t worry, baby. Don’t worry...”

“What...what happened back there?” Fiona
said, sliding across the seat until she was right up against him.
“You said she was dead. You said you were
sure
she was dead
just by looking at her.”

Those dead yellow and red eyes. That blank
stare. And the smell...

“She
was
dead, baby. I’m not going to
lie to you. She was dead, and she
was walking.”

“Nooooooooooo.” Fiona moaned the word.

“I shot her right in the stomach at point
blank range, and she was up and at ’em—at
you
—in no time at
all. And I saw her eyes, Fiona. I saw her dead, staring eyes right
above her hungry, gaping mouth.” Jubal knew he shouldn’t be talking
like this but couldn’t stop himself; he was babbling like a
lunatic.

Fiona grew silent. And then Jubal knew; she
had seen the woman’s dead eyes, too.

As they neared Damon’s house, Fiona said,
“What about my neighbors? What about poor old Mrs. Sanchez and the
Alberts?”

“We can’t worry about them right now. This is
too much for me to handle alone. I need to talk to Damon. I need to
know what he thinks of the situation. He’ll know what to do.”

“But isn’t he sick, too?”

“Yeah...” Jubal wasn’t thinking straight and
he knew it. Which only angered him.

He realized he was chewing on the inside of
his lower lip, something he hadn’t done since he was a child. It
had always been a reaction to stress and he had torn up his lip
pretty badly on occasion, causing his mother to coat the wounds
with a foul tasting antibiotic paste. Back then the tribulations he
dealt with included math class and getting the crap beat out of him
by Tommy Brainard. Today was a mite tougher. He spat out the
window, tasting the coppery tang of the blood.

Blood.

In the past few minutes he had seen more of
it than he had in his entire life. The thought of it made him a
little lightheaded and forced him to consider for the first time if
he was cut out for this line of work.

On the other hand, was anyone cut out for a
job that included facing down walking dead women? Jubal seriously
doubted it. This wasn’t some horror disc from his collection at
home. In those films, the heroes easily absorbed anything that was
thrown at them, while spouting off funny lines and kicking ass. He
was discovering that real life was different. In real life, your
brain could only handle so much before it threatened to shut down.
He was worried that Fiona wasn’t going to recover from what had
happened. Also, he wasn’t very confident about his own
stability.

The woman had died. He had no doubt about
that. Yet the truth of what he had witnessed conflicted with his
instinct. Could he have been that terribly wrong?

No.

She had been dead. She then got up and chased
them. That was the truth, no matter how much he wanted to deny it
or find a way to make it fit into some sort of nice package that
would make sense.

Nothing made sense now, except that Renee
Spencer had become a soldier in the dead army. And she was still
marching back there, dead but hungry.

Holy Christ, what had happened down in that
secret lab?

He turned into Damon Ortega’s driveway.
Except for the rooftop solar cells that glinted in the moonlight,
the house was dark. Jubal yearned for dawn. Even a strangely
colored morning sky would be preferable to this stifling gloom and
the horrors that might be hiding in the shadows, because it had
occurred to him—
and what im-fucking-peccable timing you have,
Jubal, to be spooking yourself now
—that maybe there were others
like Renee Spencer in Serenity, shambling into town during the
night, mindless, soulless, with only their need to feed propelling
them. Or maybe the sickest residents in town, the ones he hadn’t
seen for days, maybe they were also dying, shedding their humanity
and getting ready to sign up for a hitch in this new unholy
army.

He shivered in the cool of the pre-dawn
morning.

“What’s wrong?” Fiona said. She almost
sounded normal, which in itself seemed a bit cruel. Jubal suspected
they had last seen normal in the rear view mirror.

“Nothing. Just got a chill.” He opened his
door. “You coming in?”