Only now, thirty years after zombies filled the land, Arbella had become so successful that their walls couldn't contain them anymore. Jacob and quite a few of his friends, nearly all of them of the younger generation, believed that the answer to the problem was expansion. They were living in a Malthusian pressure cooker. It hadn't exploded yet, but it was only a matter of time. The First Generation, of which his mother was a proud member, had already admitted the necessity of expansion. That much was an accepted fact. But the fear was still there. The elders, the First Generation, thought they had it good behind Arbella's walls. They knew, in their hearts, that the walls needed to be pushed farther out into the Zone, that more land needed to be taken under Arbella's wings, but they weren't quite ready to commit.
They invariably came back with some version of the same tired old truism.
Our strategy saved our lives, and it has worked brilliantly since then. Just look at our success. The world out there wants to kill us. No good can come from pushing into that world. You are safe here. You have a good and a happy home here. Outside those walls, you'll find only death.
Jacob and his friends had argued until they were blue in the face, but the First Generation refused to budge.
At least, right up to the moment that they agreed to let Jacob lead a team of explorers out into the Zone.
“Go see what's out there,” Arbella's leaders had told him. “Come back and tell us. Then we'll make a decision.”
Things had seemed so bright and shiny at that moment.
They were considerably less so now.
Now, after losing eleven of Arbella's best and brightest to Slavers and zombies, to murderers and thieves, and, in the case of Nick Carroll, his best friend, to Arbella's own Code of justice, he wondered at the price.
And to end up here. In a nation of hypocrites who hated everything he'd been taught to believe.
Worse still was the war he fought with his conscience. It was one thing to believe in the expansionist philosophy, to preach it in the streets and in the Council chambers, but it was quite another thing to lead ten of your closest friends to the slaughter in order to prove it.
He was going to have a hard time living with that.
His thoughts ran that way for hours, beating himself up one moment, thinking of all the ways he was right the next, but it was all just the same pony running around the same track. He got nowhere, and he proved nothing.
But then, shortly before the sun came up, his thoughts were broken by a scream.
He sat up, and realized with a sense of admonishment that he'd let himself drift.
He stared across the lab and saw Brooks sitting in the same place he'd been before, his back against the wall, the tablet resting on his knees. Only now the man was sitting up, his attention focused on the door to the autopsy room behind Jacob.
“What was that?” Brooks said.
“Stay there,” Jacob said.
He rose from his chair and kicked it out of the way, the pistol already in his hand. Inside the lab, Chelsea and Kelly were screaming. Jacob tried the door, but it was locked. He hit it with his fists, kicked it.
“Open the door!” he yelled.
One of the women screamed again. Jacob rammed the door with his shoulder, but it wouldn't budge.
“What's going on?” Brooks said from behind him.
“How the fuck should I know?” Jacob said.
He rammed the door again, without success. “Kelly,” he said, pounding on the door, “it's locked. What's going on?”
Something inside the lab crashed. He heard metal clattering onto the floor and glass shattering.
“Kelly!”
There was a second crash, more broken glass, and then everything went quiet for a moment.
Jacob hit the door again. “Kelly, open this thing up! It's locked.”
The lock clicked. Jacob pushed the door open and ran inside. The lab was a mess. There was broken glass and cups and plastic tubs all over the floor. Chelsea was in a corner of the room, huddled into a ball on the floor, shaking uncontrollably, her face a mask of disbelief and shock, streaked with tears. Kelly was standing in the middle of the room, breathing hard, terrified.
Jacob heard glass snapping over to his right. Miriam was bent over, her head stuck in a glass case. She was thrashing, trying to pull herself loose, spraying blood all over the place, but it was no good. A large piece of glass had pierced her throat, and it held her pinned like a bug in a display case.
“Miriam, no!” Brooks pushed his way around Jacob and ran for the woman's side. He stared at her in horror, his mouth hanging open. “Oh no, Miriam. Oh no!”
Miriam's corpse continued to thrash. She grunted and snarled, even as her throat filled with blood.
Brooks backed away, his hand over his mouth. “Oh, baby, no.”
Suddenly Miriam turned her head toward Brooks. The movement was enough to shift her weight on the glass shard that held her pinned and it snapped. She pulled herself from the cabinet and took a few halting steps toward Brooks.
“Oh, baby,” Brooks said, shaking his head as he backed away. “Baby, no.”
Miriam opened her mouth and a small river of blood seeped out. Her clothes were soaked through with her blood, the white of the blouse she wore only visible on the sleeves. She looked around her, then stretched her hands toward Brooks and went after him.
Jacob reacted the only way he could. He shoved her down so that she was bent over one of the autopsy tables, put the muzzle of his pistol on the back of her head, and fired.
From the corner, Chelsea let out a horrible scream.
Brooks looked very close to throwing up, and when Miriam's body slid off the table and collapsed on the floor, he did.
A stunned silence settled over the group.
Kelly moved to Jacob's side.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
“I don't know,” Kelly said. “We were asleep. I woke up to Chelsea screaming. Miriam was on top of her, trying to claw through her blankets.”
“She'd already turned?”
Kelly nodded.
Jacob tried to process what he was seeing. How could the woman have died? Was she injured in the crash? He hadn't thought so, and thinking back over their run through the city, and again through the tunnels, he hadn't seen any signs that she was hurt.
“Did she say anything? Complain of any pain?”
Kelly shook her head.
Jacob looked over at Chelsea, but the girl looked unreachable. The grief and shock and pain on her face were frightening to behold.
On the opposite side of the room, Brooks was nearly doubled over, one hand on his knee, the other wiping away the vomit from his lips. Jacob wasn't quite sure what to make of him anymore.
Still lost for answers, Jacob looked back down at the corpse of Dr. Miriam Sayer. From the mouth up, there was nothing left of her head.
But then Jacob noticed something.
He knelt down next to the corpse and cupped her chin in his hand.
“Don't you touch her!” Chelsea screamed.
“I'm sorry, Chelsea, I have to.”
He turned what was left of her head to one side, then pushed it back the other way. Finally, he tilted the chin up.
“What are you doing?” Brooks said.
Jacob stood up. “Look at that.”
Brooks looked like that was the last thing he wanted to do, but he stepped forward and squinted at Miriam Sayer's neck. “What in the world is that? Is that a bruise?”
“Yep,” Jacob said. He glanced again at the bruise. The basic pattern was familiar. He'd seen them before in family violence cases back in Arbella, when a drunk husband would choke his wife. He recognized the fingertip marks on the left side of Miriam's throat, meaning whoever had done it was probably right-handed, though the index and middle finger marks showed odd patterns on them, like the murderer had been holding something in his hands when he choked her.
“I don't understand,” Chelsea said. “What bruise?”
“On her neck,” Jacob said. “Chelsea, somebody killed her.”
C
HAPTER
19
Chelsea stood and crossed the room to her aunt's corpse on wobbly legs. She stopped a few feet from the body and looked down like a woman who was standing on the edge of a very high cliff.
Then her face seemed to harden.
She looked at Brooks, and the eyes that had been blurry and red with tears now glowed with hatred. “You did this,” she said. “You did this!”
“No,” Brooks said.
But it was too late. Chelsea ran at him, slashing at his face with her fingernails, kicking him with everything she had. “Liar!” she screamed. “You fucking liar!”
Brooks had been taken off guard, or perhaps he was still in shock from Miriam's death. He tried to fight the girl off, but she raged like a wildcat on his face.
Finally, Jacob intervened. He grabbed Chelsea by the arm, but she slipped out of his hands. He went at her again, this time hooking his arms under her arms and clasping his hands together behind her neck. He pulled it back and fell into one of the autopsy tables. It served as a support for him, and he held her there, waiting for some of the fight to ebb out of her.
When at last she stopped screaming he tried talking to her. “Chelsea, just stop. Stop, okay? Let me figure this out.”
“He murdered her,” Chelsea said. “I don't understand it. I was sleeping right next to her.”
“I'm gonna let you go,” he said. “But I need you to let me figure this out. Attacking him isn't going to solve anything.”
The girl stopped struggling.
“We good?”
“Yes,” she said.
Slowly, he let her go.
Brooks stood on his side of the room, watching the girl warily while he rubbed his scratched-up wrists and cheeks. He was bleeding in several places, including a nasty cut near his left eye.
Jacob walked over to the man. “Show me your hands.”
“Another baseless accusation, Jacob?”
“Just show me your damn hands.”
“I knew her better than any of you,” he said. He nodded at Chelsea. “Even you. I didn't kill her. I would never harm her.”
“Show me your hands,” Jacob said. “Now.”
Brooks turned a
fuck you
stare at him, but held out his hands. “Happy now?”
“Turn them over, asshole. I want to see your fingertips.”
Brooks flipped his hands over. “Are we done now?” he asked.
“Yeah, we're done.”
Jacob turned away. He looked around the room. Whoever had killed Miriam had locked the door leading to where Jacob and Brooks had been, which meant that he must have left through one of the two back doors. One of the doors had a stack of boxes in front of it, so it probably wasn't that one. He went to the third door and looked at the knob. No fingerprints that he could see, just smudges. That wouldn't be any help.
“Wait a minute,” Chelsea said. “What about him?”
Jacob turned back to her and sighed. “He didn't do it.”
“Oh good, at last,” Brooks said. “The cop gets one right.”
“Yes, he did!” Chelsea shouted.
“No, he didn't. I didn't think he did. I was out there with him the whole time you were in here. I would have noticed if he'd slipped off. He didn't.”
“Then why go through the charade of looking at my hands?” Brooks said. “Was that just the cop pushing his weight around?”
“No, that was me not trusting you. I think you're a lying sack of shit, Lester Brooks, and I think you're guilty as sin for sending those men after us.” He gestured at Miriam's corpse. “But this you didn't do.”
He pulled his pistol again and walked toward the door the killer had gone out.
“Where are you going?” Kelly said.
“Whoever did this went this way. I'm gonna see what I can find.”
With that he stepped through the door and into a large, tiled hallway. To his left was a workstation, a large, neat desk like the kind he'd seen in hospitals while in the Zone with the salvage teams years ago. To his right, the hallway branched off in several directions. The guy could have gone down any one of the halls, but something in Jacob's gut told him to check the large room at the end of the hall.
He made it about halfway down the hall before he stopped.
The hairs at the back of his neck were tingling.
He stood still and listened.
A moment later, he heard feet scraping along the tiled floor. He raised his weapon and walked slowly forward. As he neared the mouth of the hallway, he saw a large, round room. He was on the second story. A wide balcony wrapped all the way around the round room, looking down on a common area below. Jacob went to the right side of the hallway, put his back against the wall, and slowly advanced toward the end of the hallway, trying to maximize what he could see of the balcony.
Sure enough, two gray-looking corpses were trudging along near the railing, headed his way. Behind them, six more were climbing the stairs.
Damn it, he thought. That could only mean one thing. Whoever had killed Miriam had also opened the barricades that kept their shelter safe.
Well, it wasn't safe anymore.
He ran back down the hallway as quietly as he could. Once back inside the lab with the others, he brought them up to speed. “We need to get out of here,” he said.
“And go where, exactly?” Brooks said.
“I don't know. Anywhere but here. They're about to come through that door.”
“We can't leave this building,” Brooks said.
Jacob raised an eyebrow at him. “Did you not hear what I just said? The defenses have been compromised. You remember the one hundred million zombies all around us? Well, they're about to find their way in here.”
“The extraction team is meeting us here. If we're not here, they won't stay. We'll die here.”
“We'll die if we stay here.”
“Not if we go to the roof.”
Jacob thought about that for a moment. “No,” he said. “That won't work, either. You said the extraction team was forty-eight hours away at the earliest, right?”
Brooks nodded.
“That's two days on the roof in the El Paso summer heat with no water and no food. And if the exposure doesn't kill us, the zombies surely will when they bust through the roof access door. No thanks. The roof is a death trap.”
“I'm not going out there.”
“Fine,” Jacob said. “I've told you already. You're not a hostage. If you want to go off on your own, you're welcome to it.”
“That won't work, either, and you know it. We have to stay together.”
“Suit yourself.” He pointed to Chelsea. “Would you please lock that door? That'll buy us some time. I think we need to go back that way,” he said to Kelly, indicating the door Miriam's killer had locked on them.
“Why that way?”
“There's a passageway out there that should lead to a side door. The zombies don't know we're in here, so we might have a chance of slipping away unseen. And besides, that'll put us on the west side of the building. We'll be able to run to the buildings south of here or head toward the aerofluyts, depending on which way looks easiest.”
Chelsea had gone to the door while Jacob was laying out their plan. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her start to close the door, when a zombie hit it from the other side. The door flew back in the girl's face, and she let out a startled scream. An arm came through the door as the zombie uttered its feeding moan.
Jacob darted forward and pulled Chelsea out of the way. “Get back!” he said.
The zombie stumbled through the door. It was a herd zombie, gray from its desiccated and cadaverous face down to its feet, where the skin had all but worn away, leaving nothing but bone that was naked and cracked. Jacob could hardly tell if the thing had once been a man or a woman. Decay had taken it long beyond that point.
But as it stumbled into the room, it carried with it an unmistakable stench of decay. The smell was so overpowering it seemed to fill the room, and it pushed Jacob away like a living thing, with a power all its own. He fought back the urge to wretch. Instead he backed up, pushed Chelsea out of the way, and put a compressed-air round in the center of the thing's head.
There were two more, just as rotted away, just as sexless, as the first. He dropped them both, then stepped into the hallway.
A woman in the remnants of a dress moaned and raised her hands to clutch at him, even though she was a good twenty feet away.
Jacob closed the distance quickly and put her down.
Beyond her, the large open room at the end of the hallway teemed with movement. The zombies had found their way inside.
He glanced down at the weapon in his hands and was surprised to see he had only four rounds left.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
Though he was on fire inside, he forced himself to hold it together. He wanted to sprint for the door, but he knew the others would key off the way he behaved, so he forced himself to walk back to the room. Chelsea had come to the door to see what was going on. He put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Back inside, okay?”
He closed and locked the door.
“We need to get moving,” he said. He looked over at Brooks. “How many magazines do you have left?”
“Six, I think.”
“Okay, let me have them. I'm down to four rounds.”
Brooks hesitated.
It was long enough to get Jacob's attention.
“Hand 'em over,” Jacob said.
“No, you give me the gun.”
“Brooks, I'm not playing with you.”
“Nor I with you. The gun is no good without the ammunition, so turn it over.”
“I will not negotiate when it comes to my survival,” Jacob said. “Give me the fucking ammunition right now.”
“Or you'llâ”
Jacob threw a roundhouse to the man's chin before he could finish his sentence. Brooks didn't go down, but he fell back in sudden terror. “What's wrong with you?” Brooks said. “Is this how cops force other people to do what they want?”
“No,” Jacob said. “This is how men survive.”
He threw another roundhouse at Brooks, catching him under the chin. But this time he didn't stop. He moved in close and threw two sharp jabs with his right, causing Brooks to fall over onto his back. Jacob jumped onto the man's chest and started hammering blows to the man's face. As hard as he could. As fast as he could.
Brooks grabbed Jacob's arm, but it was an impotent gesture, and when Jacob felt the man's grip go slack, he leaned back, grabbed hold of Brooks's gray hair, and tilted his head back.
Brooks stared up at him through eyes filled with blood. His lips looked like smashed fruit. He was covered in blood.
“I told you not to fuck with my survival,” Jacob said.
Then he slammed his elbow down on the bridge of Brooks's nose. The bones broke with a horrible
crack
, and Brooks went limp. Jacob fished through the man's pocket and came away with six magazines. About three hundred and eighty rounds to work with. Not nearly enough, but he'd make it work. He always did.
“Alright, come on,” he said, gently, but firmly, slapping Brooks's face. “Come on, get up.”
Brooks came to, blinking his eyes.
When he realized it was Jacob still standing over him, he recoiled.
“Don't worry,” Jacob said. “I got what I needed. Now get up, we need to get out of here.”