Dead Earth: The Green Dawn (8 page)

The world had gone mad and it seemed
civilization was fucked.

He allowed Fiona to lead him back to the
cruiser. She took him to the passenger side of the car, and said,
“Keys.” He didn’t question her. He handed over the key ring, then
slumped into the passenger seat.

The gunshot still echoed in his mind.

They shot his mother. They said she was dead
and they shot her anyway.

You know why.

No. He didn’t want
that
disturbing
picture in his head.

They shot her because she was becoming one of
them.

“No,” Jubal whispered.

The dead army.

Fiona looked his way, but didn’t speak. He
knew she wanted to find a way to comfort him, as he had tried to do
for her after Renee Spencer died. That moment seemed to have
happened months ago. Fiona turned the car around and headed back
toward Serenity.

Maybe she couldn’t find the words; she was
likely still in shock herself.

Jubal closed his eyes and tried to think of a
time—was it just a day ago?—when the sky wasn’t green and corpses
didn’t rise from the dead. Instead, a series of images flashed
through his thoughts.

His mother comforts him after he started a
fight with the tall girl who lived next door and received a busted
nose for his trouble. She tries to look concerned, yet every now
and then a smile slips through.

His mother sits up all night next to his bed
when he shivers with a fever, frequently pressing a cold washcloth
against his forehead and murmuring silent prayers; he isn’t scared
but, rather, comforted by her presence.

His mother, dead only a few minutes, stands
up and tears through the HAZMAT suit of the soldier nearest her and
chews through the man’s stomach. When she stands up her entire face
is covered with blood and small pieces of flesh and muscle. Rivers
of scarlet flow down into her empty, cold eyes.

“Stop the car! Pull over!”

Fiona stomped on the brake pedal, forcing
Jubal to throw up a hand to brace against the dashboard.
“What?”

Before the car was completely stopped, Jubal
was out the door and throwing up on the blacktop. He fell to his
knees; it felt like his body tried to eject everything he had eaten
since he was twelve. When he was finally finished, he wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand and climbed to his feet, wincing at the
new soreness in his stomach.

Fiona was standing next to the car, her arms
folded across her chest. She studied him with a look of exhausted
concern.

She hugged him close and helped him into the
car again.

When they were about a mile farther down the
road, she said, “Would it help to talk?”

“No,” he said. But in less than a minute, he
blurted out, “My ma...they shot her. She was turning into one of
those things.” Jubal felt the hot tears fill his eyes. He turned
away from her and stared out the car window, blinking until he felt
like he wasn’t going to cry.

Fiona placed a hand on his arm.

“I loved her, too,” she said.

He put his own hand over hers. In the midst
of this madness at least something good remained in his life. “I
know,” he said.

She released his arm.

“Fee?” he said. “When we were kids, why did
you punch me in the nose?”

He turned to her in time to see the faint
smile play across her face. “You called me Stork Girl.”

He remembered. Jubal had been a smart ass
when he was a kid. He had deserved that punch in the nose.

“You always were a tough broad,” he said.

“You bet your ass.”

Jubal sighed. “I have to do something pretty
tough now and I could really use your help.”

She took his hand. “We’ll be there in just a
few minutes.”

Damon Ortega had been the second most
important man in Jubal’s life. He’d tried to be a good role model
for the boy, had taken him fishing, made sure he kept up his
studies. Damon had even been the one—at the request of Jubal’s
mother—to give the boy “the talk.” Jubal and Damon still laughed
about that one, about how the older man’s face quickly reddened and
stayed that way when he learned the depth of the boy’s
knowledge.

“You can
really
do that?” Damon had
asked.

Repeating that line never failed to make the
sheriff blush all over again.

There were so many good memories, and some
that weren’t so pleasant. Like when Damon crawled into the tequila
bottle for a few months after his wife left him. That dark episode
culminated in an ugly night at Conchita’s when a drunken Sheriff
Ortega pulled out his service revolver and shouted incoherent
threats at a—thankfully—small group of townspeople. Pops and Red
had talked him down, taken the gun away from him and then poured a
gallon of coffee into him before driving him home. The next morning
Damon emptied every bottle in his house into the kitchen sink.

There was no investigation, no charges filed.
Everyone knew Damon and the pain he was in. For his part, Damon
recognized his second chance and took it. The people of Serenity
took care of their own like they usually did. It was one of the
reasons Jubal never wished to live anywhere else.

Now he had to make another unpleasant
memory.

When they rolled up Damon’s driveway, Fiona
said, “You need a minute?”

“No.” And it was true. Jubal had somehow
managed to lock away his emotions so he could focus on what had to
be done. Later he might turn into a quivering mess, but for now he
had managed to achieve a bit of distance from today’s events.

As long you don’t count sweaty palms, a dry
mouth and a stomach so messed up that it might explode out the back
of your pants any second.

He climbed out of the cruiser and walked back
to the trunk. Locked into a brace on the inside wall was a Mossberg
.12 gauge shotgun. Jubal removed it and checked the load. He pumped
a round into the chamber and shut the trunk.

Fiona was waiting for him by the front of the
car.

“I know it won’t do any good to ask you to
stay out here,” he said.

She stared at him.

“So I won’t. But this could take a while,
Fee. If he hasn’t...you know...”

“You think I’m going to let you go through
something like this by yourself?”

He forced a smile. “Come on, Stork Girl.”

They walked to the porch and through the
front door. Jubal didn’t hesitate. With the shotgun raised, he
walked quickly to the living room.

Damon wasn’t in the room. The couch was a
mess. The cushions and the pillow were speckled with blood. Jubal
remembered the coughing fit that Renee Spencer suffered through
before she passed.

“We have to search the place,” he said. “Stay
behind me.”

They went through Damon’s house room by room.
It didn’t take long. Jubal led the way, checking behind each door
and around any corner that didn’t offer a clear view. Fiona was
close by, with her body at a 90-degree angle from him, so she could
keep an eye on Jubal and anything that might try to sneak up behind
them.

When they reached the small kitchen, Jubal
saw a small pool of blood in the sink.

“He was in here.”

“Not anymore,” Fiona said. She pointed at the
small window over the sink.

Damon had built the gazebo back in his
married days with the help of Jubal’s dad. Susan was already making
noise about the limitations of being married to a small town cop,
so Damon was trying to fix the place up a bit to appease her. These
days he sat out there on occasion, sipping a can of beer, but
nothing stronger. Sometimes Jubal would join him.

Now a dark form was slumped across the
gazebo’s bench.

Jubal stepped through the back door. It was
suddenly hard to breathe, as though a band of steel had tightened
across his chest.

He took a couple steps toward the gazebo. He
could hear the crunch of Fiona’s shoes on the dry soil behind him.
She was keeping a bit of distance between them.

Good girl. If there were trouble, maybe it
wouldn’t take both of them.

Jubal took two more steps. He was fifteen feet
from the gazebo. He could clearly see the back of the prone man’s
head. It was definitely Damon.

Damon sat up and swiveled his head around,
farther than Jubal thought possible.

“Damon?”

Fiona gasped.

Damon was through the gazebo’s screen door
and running at Jubal.

Jubal froze, his shotgun held loosely in his
hands. He could not accept that Damon had turned into a monster.
This was a man he had looked up to his whole life. And
loved—something he’d never told the older man.

Now the dead sheriff glared at him with
orange eyes. Folds and flaps, where the blisters had burst, covered
his gray skin. Off-white saliva stretched between his upper and
lower teeth. His hands were curled into killing claws. Sheriff
Damon Ortega snarled, sounding more animal than human.

“Damon, stop,” Jubal said, as the zombie
sheriff barreled into him, knocking him to the ground. Jubal rolled
onto his back and pulled the trigger of the shotgun.

The blast hit Damon squarely in the chest,
flinging him backwards to the ground.

Jubal got to his feet. “What have I
done?”

“You had to do it, Jube. He was going to kill
us,” Fiona said.

“Man, this is crazy. I don’t know if I can
take much more...”

Damon sat up, grinning, with a gaping hole in
his chest. His mouth dropped open and he made a sound that reminded
Jubal of Jurassic Park pterodactyls.

“F-fuck,” Jubal said.

Damon got to his feet, swaying a little. Then
he took a step forward. His bright orange eyes were stretched wide
open, and the orbs looked as if they had no lids. His mouth gaped
and emitted a croak.

Jubal could do nothing as Damon took slow,
staggering steps toward him. It was as if it were a dream that he’d
soon wake up from.

Yeah, that’s it. All I have to do is wake up.
Just wait a few seconds and it’ll be over.

Damon’s head burst apart into gray chunks and
red mist in what seemed like slow motion. His headless body dropped
to its knees, then keeled over.

But Jubal hadn’t pulled the trigger of the
shotgun. He looked down at his hands. The shotgun was gone. He
looked over at Fiona.

She had taken it from him and he hadn’t even
noticed. The barrel still smoked from the killing shot.

This wasn’t a nightmare; it was real. Why did
he have to keep reminding himself of that?

Jubal’s face felt funny. He reached a hand
up; it was coated with tears. He looked at his wet fingers as if the
substance upon them was some alien liquid.

“C’mon, baby. Let’s get out of here,” Fiona
said, grabbing his upper arm. “There’s nothing you could have
done.”

They made their way around the house, their
feet crunching in gravel. By the time they had reached the cruiser,
the rising sun had dehydrated Jubal’s tears.

“We need more guns,” he said.

It was another scorcher in downtown Serenity.
But unlike most mornings, Main Street and its sidewalks were
completely empty. Not even Bubba, the old dog owned by Phil Marx
over at the Amoco, was to be seen; the mutt usually roamed up and
down the sidewalks, looking for affection or handouts. He always
had a wag of the tail for everyone.

Fiona made a low moan in her throat.

Jubal ignored it. The numbness in his mind
had returned and he felt like a wooden puppet only loosely
controlled by its own wooden brain.

He rolled the cruiser to a stop in front of
the sheriff’s office.

“You stay in the car, Fee. I’ll leave it on
with the air going. Use the shotgun if you need to. I’m going to
get more weapons.”

Fiona nodded weakly, staring out the
windshield at nothing much.

Jubal laid the shotgun on the driver’s seat
as he left the car. He slammed the door and paused, listening.

A mourning dove cooed somewhere. There was a
muffled crash and clatter, as if from a toppled piece of furniture
in a far off building. Then nothing.

Ignoring the piles of reports on the desk,
which no longer meant anything to him—or to anybody—he walked
straight to the gun cabinet. Jubal unlocked it and withdrew a Glock
to replace the one the soldiers had confiscated, and two more
shotguns just like the one in the car, along with an armload of
ammo boxes. Looking around, he saw nothing else he thought he’d
need.

What do you need when the world is
ending?

What entertaining thoughts his mind
conjured.

Outside, the car door slammed.

Jubal thought he heard Fiona say something.
He laid the weapons and ammunition on the overflowing desk except
for the Glock.

He left the front door open and stepped out
onto the sidewalk.

Fiona stood behind the opened car door,
sighting along the Mossberg laid across the top of the door.

Jubal looked where she was aiming.

Far down the street, the walking dead
creature that had once been the lab worker Renee shambled towards
them. She held something loosely in her grip. Jubal squinted
against the light and saw that it was a severed hand. As he
watched, she put one of its pale fingers into her mouth and bit it
off with a snap that Jubal could hear quite clearly even from this
distance.

“Are you okay?” Jubal asked, not taking his
eyes off Renee.

Fiona grunted assent, still sighting along
the shotgun.

“You know,” Jubal said, sliding on his
sunglasses. “It’s just a matter of time before the whole town ends
up like her.”

Fiona turned her head towards him with an
astonished look on her face. “Mr. Sensitive now, are we?”

“Just the facts, ma’am,” Jubal said in a
monotone, lifting his Glock and taking aim. “Die, bitch.”

Jubal shot once and Renee’s head snapped
back. She wobbled around a bit, as if beginning a waltz step, then
toppled over onto her face.