“Money, right? Once word got out that the technology was bad, he was going to lose everything. Fame and fortune and all that.”
“Yeah, something like that. It's just that, I knew him. I thought I did anyway. He believed in the society we'd created. No guns, no cops. Why would he do this?”
“Beats me,” Jacob said. “Maybe he was just an asshole.”
“He was my friend,” Brooks said.
Jacob shrugged. “Your friend was an asshole. Then again, so are you, but you know, whatever.”
Jacob pushed him out of the way. He leaned out the window and tried to get a sense for the best way to get to the APV.
From behind him, he heard Chelsea cry out, “Jacob, they're coming.”
“Got it,” he said.
He put three of the grenades in his pocket and held the other up to see how it worked. The one Jordan had thrown took about five seconds to blow, and Jacob remembered the man twisting the cylinder just one click. The first mark on the barrel was a thin, black line. There were four more black lines arranged around the circumference, each one thicker than the one before it. He figured those indicated increasing longer delays on detonation. Simple enough. He twisted the cylinder all the way to the fattest line, glanced out the window again, and threw the grenade into the crowd.
“Alright,” he said. “Time to move. We'll hit those stairs right there and move outside as fast as we can. Stay behind me because I plan on using a few more of these.”
Jacob had just stepped into the hall when the grenade went off. The blast rattled the whole building and nearly knocked him off his feet, but he didn't let it slow him down. He charged for the stairwell and saw two zombies struggling to get back on their feet. He shot the first one with the Colt right above its right ear, and the impact nearly split its rotten head in two.
The second zombie managed to get to its feet, but it was having trouble navigating the stairs. It got turned around and couldn't figure out how to face its meal again. Jacob bum-rushed the dead man, throwing his shoulder in his chest and driving him back toward the sliding glass doors. Two other zombies had already made it through the shattered windows, but Jacob was able to drive the zombie into them, knocking all three to the ground.
To his left, more of the dead were coming through the window. They sliced themselves up on the jagged glass still in the sill, but of course they didn't even register the pain. Jacob shot all three in the head, then waved Kelly and the others through the door. “Come on, hurry!” he said.
Once Brooks made it through, Jacob took his position at the front. Ahead of them, they got a view of just how much destruction the grenade had caused. Jacob saw a field of broken and blasted-apart corpses. Arms and legs were festooned off the sides of the building. Burned and, in most cases, unidentifiable body parts were everywhere. It was hard to walk without tripping over an arm or a leg or somebody's shattered head. But of course the zombies gave them no quarter. Even after the devastating blast, more zombies were already closing in to fill the gap.
Jacob pulled another grenade and tossed it into the crowd ahead.
“Get down!” he shouted.
Everybody hit the ground. Jacob, who had been through this before, knew to cup his hands over his ears and open his mouth to ease the pressure.
It did little good when the bomb went off, though. The shock wave hit him, and after it was over, he couldn't hear a damn thing but a constant ringing.
Get to your feet
, a voice inside his head roared.
Get to your feet!
He stood up, dizzy as hell and uncertain which way he was facing. All he could see was a rain of black ash in the air. Jacob blinked and pivoted around, trying to get his bearings. He saw the APV up ahead, nothing but body parts all around it, but he didn't see Kelly and the others.
“Kelly!” he screamed. “Kelly!”
He heard groaning behind him. He spun around so quickly he nearly pitched over. Kelly was facedown in the grass, trying to say his name. Chelsea was next to her, and it looked like she was unconscious.
He knelt by Kelly's side. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.
“Jacob, I . . . I can't . . . I can't . . .”
“Shit,” he said. He reached down, scooped her up, and put her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. He did the same with Chelsea and ran for the APV.
The side door was locked tight, so he kicked it with all the strength he had left.
“Stu!” he yelled. “Open the fucking door!”
The next instant the door cracked open and Stu stuck his head out. Stu's mouth fell open at the carnage. “Holy hell,” he said.
“Help me with them,” Jacob said.
He handed Kelly to him first, and then Chelsea. Stu and Juliette took the women and led them into the darkness of the APV's belly.
“Where's Brooks?” Stu asked.
“I don't know. I'm going to find him. You got them?”
“We got this.”
Jacob stepped away from the APV. The black ash from a thousand burned bodies still hung in the air. The smell of burning flesh was overpowering. He pushed through it, though, and worked his way back to where they'd been standing when the grenade went off.
He found Brooks crumpled against a wall.
“Brooks,” Jacob said, “can you hear me?”
The older man opened his eyes. They were yellowed and bloodshot. His milk and coffee complexion was discolored from the ash. It was all in his white hair, on his teeth, hanging from his eyelashes.
“I can't move,” he said. “It's my legs. I can't feel them.”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “I've been there before. Come on, I'll help you up.”
“No, Jacob. I mean it. Something's wrong. I think my back might be broken.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. “No worries. I'll carry you.”
Jacob picked him up as gently as he could, trying hard to keep his back in the exact same position it had been on the ground. He had probably eight meters to go, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that the dead were already marching toward the disturbance.
“Gotta hurry,” Jacob said. “Sorry if this hurts.”
He took off in a run, dodging the dead whenever they got too close. Brooks screamed from the pain, but Jacob didn't dare stop running, not with skeletal zombies falling on his shoulders, clutching at his hair.
“Hang in there,” he said to Brooks. “Just hang on.”
There was a pile of debris in front of himâhulking chunks of concrete shot through with twisted rebar. Zombies were coming around on either side. He turned, looking for a way to end-run around them, but he was blocked there, too.
“Sorry to do this to you, Brooks,” Jacob said.
He heaved the man up and over his left shoulder, freeing up his gun hand. Even with Brooks screaming in his ear, Jacob took the time to chart his course. Rushed shooting was bad shooting, and he only had the one chance to get this right.
There were two fast-moving zombies coming around the right side of the debris pile. On the left were four zombies, all slow movers, barely shambling along. He could take out the four pretty easily. He might even be able to simply move around them. But that would leave the fast movers at his back, and that was a variable he wasn't prepared to allow.
He turned to his right, sighted the Colt's front sights on the leading zombie, and fired.
God, he loved the Colt!
The zombie nearly did a backflip when it was hit in the face with the forty-five-caliber round. The zombie behind it bounded over the corpse, only to get a second round square in the forehead. Both zombies dropped to the ground, going nowhere, dead for real this time.
Jacob saw the gap they left and ran for it.
Stu was at the open door, waving him on.
“I think his back is broken,” Jacob said.
“Oh shit,” Stu said. Whether from the pain or from something else, Jacob wasn't sure, but the man had passed out. Stu slapped his face, but Brooks was unresponsive. “Does he have a pulse?” He put his fingers up to Brooks's neck, but Jacob could tell the man was pressing too hard. “I can't feel a pulse. We need to do CPR.”
Stu put his hands on Brooks's neck, like he was choking him.
“No!” Jacob said, and moved his hands down to the base of Brooks's sternum. “It's down here, two fingers up from the base of the sternum.”
Stu moved his hands down where Jacob pointed, but Jacob didn't let him continue.
“Stand by, let me check for a pulse.”
“He doesn't have a pulse. I already checked.”
“Yes, he does!” Jacob said. “I can feel it. You don't need the CPR if he's got a pulse. Just get him inside. I'll cover you.”
One thing Jacob could say about Stu. The man took direction well. He called to Juliette to help him. Together, they started pulling Brooks into the APV.
Jacob spun around to face the horde that had been gathering at his back.
There were four right in front of him. He pulled the trigger on the first one, dropped him, and then realized that the slide had locked back in the empty position. The Colt was a masterpiece of the armor's art, but it only carried seven bullets, and he'd just reached the end of that line.
“Need you to hurry it up there, Stu,” he said.
“Almost there.”
Jacob ejected the spent magazine and slapped in a new one. He quickly dispatched the other zombies, but that just left room for a hundred more right behind them.
“Stu?”
“Clear!” the man said. “Get in here!”
Jacob didn't need to be told twice. He ran for the door and jumped through just as the zombies were putting their hands on him.
He landed at Kelly's feet.
Her face was covered in ash and she had that two-thousand-yard stare, but he saw her eyes focus on his.
“Hey,” he said. “How you doing?”
At first she didn't react, but slowly, a smile lit the corners of her mouth.
C
HAPTER
23
Like most of the citizens of Arbella, Jacob had received basic emergency medical training. He could do the easy stuff, like CPR, burns and cuts, heatstroke, and snake bites. He could even set a broken bone, if he had to. Not well, but he could do it. So he sat Kelly and Chelsea down and gave them both a casual once-over. Both were complaining of a loud ringing in their ears, and Kelly said she thought she had something caught in her eye, but neither woman was seriously hurt. Just covered in dirt from head to toe.
Brooks was a harder case. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, no doubt from the pain. He had some nasty-looking cuts on his face and bits of broken glass in his hair, and he was wheezing through the broken nose Jacob had given him earlier. Stu and Juliette had him on one of the medical couches in the back of the transport. Jacob was familiar with some of the medical scanners they were using on Brooks from his time in the hospital back in Temple, but he had no idea what the blinking lights and fluctuating graphs meant. He waited for Stu and Juliette to finish whatever they were doing.
Finally, Juliette pointed to a green and grainy image on a computer screen that sort of looked like an X-ray of Brooks's lower spine. “See, right there?” she said to Stu.
He squinted at the image. “Yeah, I see it. Okay.”
“What is it?” Jacob asked.
“Well, the good news is his back isn't broken. Looks like he might have torn some muscles and herniated a disc or two, but it's definitely not broken.”
“That's good, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Stu said. “Trouble is, he's going to be in some serious pain for a long while. I don't know if you've ever had a herniated disc before, but in case you haven't, trust me, it hurts like hell. I think we can pretty much guarantee that he won't be able to walk until we get him some real medical treatment.”
“Can you give anything to help with the pain?”
“That's our other problem,” Stu said. “No supplies.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they were getting ready to put these APVs out of service. They were in the process of stripping them. This was the only one that they hadn't started tearing the guts out of yet. But they've already off-loaded all the medical supplies.”
Jacob nodded. “What about the other stuff?”
“What other stuff?”
“The food and water?”
Stu and Juliette traded a horrified look. “Oh God,” Juliette said. “He's right. There's no food in here.”
“Nothing at all?” Jacob asked.
“There's water,” Stu said. “The APV has built-in condensers that make drinking water out of the water vapor in the air. We won't die of thirst, but we don't have any food. The trouble is, the condensers, like the air-conditioning and the navigation system and about a thousand other onboard systems, usually rely on the solar cells for the electricity they run on. Now that we're using that electricity to operate the drivetrain, as well, we'll be lucky to get an hour of travel time a day. And, actually, it'll probably be closer to thirty minutes. We'll have to charge the vehicle during the day, and run as far as we can after sunset. But the whole time we're charging, our subsystems will be using the cells. We'll never be able to reach a full charge that way.”
“Why don't we just turn the subsystems off?”
“We can do that, no problem. But, like I said, we have literally thousands of subsystems on this vehicle that don't draw that much power from the cells, like maybe five percent.”
“If that,” Juliette said.
Stu nodded. “True. The big draw is the air-conditioning. That's probably thirty percent of our power draw right there.”
“Do we need that?”
“It gets up to a hundred and fifteen degrees here in El Paso during the day,” Stu said. “Imagine being inside this tin can in that kind of heat with no air-conditioning. We'd cook ourselves.”
“What about turning it off at night, while we're running?”
“Might buy us some extra driving time,” Stu said. “Not much.”
Juliette tapped her fingertips and muttered to herself, like she was doing math in her head. “About twenty-one minutes each day,” she said. “Assuming the system continues to work at optimal efficiency.”
“Right,” Stu said. “I think we could expect that eff i-ciency to taper off with time, though. The APV was never meant to run like we're running it. We're putting a huge amount of stress on the system.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. He held up a hand between them. “That's enough. Miriam was right: You guys give me a headache.”
He looked down at Lester Brooks, who was groaning quietly through clenched teeth. The man was still unconscious, though obviously hurting.
Kelly and Chelsea were okay, but he wondered how much longer everybody would be able to hold it together, especially with no food. Seeing the young girl lean against Kelly, and Kelly putting her arm over the girl's shoulder, convinced him they needed another way.
“What other options do we have?” Jacob asked Stu and Juliette.
“What do you mean?” Stu said. “This is it.”
“There are always options,” Jacob said.
“Not that I can see,” Stu said. “What are you going to do, go back out there? You'd be torn to shreds in seconds.”
“That's true.”
“What if we drive this thing over to the hangar, turn on the power, and then head back over to the charging stations aboard the aerofluyts?”
“That's a possibility,” Stu said. “It would at least save us a few days.”
“Well, yeah. We'd have to drive over to the hangar, which will take probably about thirty minutes. That's how long it took us to get from the
Einstein
to here. That'll use up all the charge we've got. Then somebody will have to go outside to turn on the power. Assuming they make it through that, we'll have to wait overnight, then spend most of the next day charging up again, then make the drive to the
Einstein
, where we can dock with one of the rapid charging couplers. Fully charged, we should have about two and a half days of power to get where we're going.”
“But that won't be enough to get away from the herd.”
“No, it won't. And after that, we'll be back to the food question again. I estimate we have a week's worth of days with no food, no matter what we do.”
“So we're screwed no matter what we do.”
“Pretty much,” Stu said.
Frustrated, Jacob looked away. There was a short set of stairs off to his left that led down to the lower level, into the belly of the APV.
“Unless . . .”
He went down the stairs. Stu watched him go, then glanced at Juliette, shrugged his shoulders, and followed Jacob.
At the base of the stairs, Jacob found a series of three alcoves. Inside each one was a battle suit. Each suit was scuffed up and stained from numerous previous EVAs. They'd all seen plenty of action, that much was obvious, but they all looked sturdy enough.
“What about these?”
Stu's eyebrows went up. “I don't know. What are you thinking?”
“I'm thinking I can shave a day or two off our time,” Jacob said. “What if I put one of these on, head to the hangar, and turn the power on? Meanwhile, you guys head to the
Einstein
. I'll turn the power on and meet you there.”
Stu cupped his chin in his hand and turned slightly toward Juliette. “Four days without food is a lot better than seven.”
“Definitely,” she said.
“It won't be easy,” Stu said. “The suits are amazing, but they're not indestructible. If they pile on you, they can work their way through the suit in no time.”
“So, you're saying, don't get killed,” Jacob said. “I got it.”
“Well, okay.”
Stu looked to Juliette and she shrugged. “It's worth a shot,” she said.
“Okay,” Stu said. “I agree. Let's hook up.”