Love in an Undead Age, A.M. Geever [best contemporary novels txt] 📗
- Author: A.M. Geever
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Miranda pulled her dagger from her splint and tossed it to Seffie. Seffie pivoted to a zombie two feet away. She drove the dagger hilt-deep into its eye socket.
Screams of panic, crashing sounds of combat, and the stampede of hundreds of feet intensified in the balcony. An arrow brushed Miranda’s shoulder as it whizzed by. The archers in the pit were killing zombies!
Two more members of the Prophet’s guard fell into the arena, but these men were alive. The undead swarmed, crawling over one another like ants. The men’s agonized shrieks amplified the uproar. The zombies began to break into smaller groups, snarling at one another over bloody limbs and trailing intestines in the fine mist of blood that hung in the air.
The Prophet climbed to his knees, his eyes unfocused. “You will die, blasphemers.”
Miranda punched his temple. He fell face-first in the mud, unconscious.
Doug slammed a zombie’s head against the wall until it went limp. Its smashed skull left a trailing smudge as it slid to the ground. Connor stomped on the face of a downed zombie, black blood and brains spattering his trousers. Archers loosed arrows with abandon, but no one had counted on there being more zombies than the last Faith Walk.
A zombie dressed in clothing made from the plain homespun fabric that the inhabitants of New Jerusalem favored staggered toward Miranda. A mother or wife once, perhaps both, but now its bloodcurdling moan and snapping teeth made every hair on Miranda’s body ripple unpleasantly to attention. Miranda tugged on the bandages of her splint. Hastily, she tied the Prophet’s hands behind his back as the zombie closed in. She pulled one of the slats from her disentangling splint and stood, ready to charge.
Miranda looked at the zombie, really looked at it, instead of simply registering it as a threat to be eliminated. Her heart plummeted.
Oh God, it’s Bethany.
Two days ago the zombie had been New Jerusalem’s healer, an ally who paid the ultimate price for helping them. Miranda raised the splint, resolute, when the Bethany-zombie stopped and turned away.
Of course, he repels them!
Even though she had seen their behavior during the last Faith Walk, with zombies so close Miranda had gone on defensive auto-pilot. She caught up to the zombie in three steps, the splint solid in her hand. As the zombie turned toward her, she plunged the splint into its eye. The creature that had once been Bethany crumpled to the ground.
“Fall back!” she cried, trying to be heard over the chaos. She could see Mike and Mario. They swung truncheons that must have fallen clear when the Prophet’s Guardsmen plummeted into the pit. Seffie still wielded Miranda’s dagger. Even with the archers firing from within the pit and the balcony, where the sounds of fighting had abated somewhat, the battle was fierce and closely fought.
They’re cut off, she realized.
A piercing whistle cut the air, followed by a voice. “To me,” it cried. “Here, to me!”
Miranda turned to see Finn standing in the first doorway on the south side of the building, waving his crossbow above his tawny maned head.
“Fall back,” the archers began to shout.
Mario, Doug, and Mike fought against a rising tide of zombies on the other side of the arena. There were too many. Only the Prophet, who began to thrash feebly, could save them. Miranda propped the semiconscious man into a sitting position and tried to drag him toward the melee. She looked over her shoulder at the three men she needed to save. I won’t make it, she thought desperately.
Then Connor appeared. “I’ve got him,” he said as he squatted down to shift the Prophet onto his shoulder.
With a grunt, Connor stood upright. Miranda kept close, unsure how far away from Jeremiah she could be and still be protected. She saw Mike say something to Doug. Doug pointed to her and Connor, but Mike shook his head. Then he ducked and plowed into the horde. He sidestepped and twirled with the grace of a running back, deflecting with shoulder and elbow, every movement precise as he worked his way deeper. And then he stopped.
“Mike, no!” Miranda cried, horror enveloping her even as the zombies nearest to her jerked away from the Prophet.
One moment Mike was there. In the next, he was not. Zombies engulfed him. As if by hive mind, most turned toward the nearest, easiest target.
Mario and Doug made a break for it across the pit as a howl sliced the air. Seffie charged the horde. Miranda grabbed her arm, barely able to hold on.
“Mike!” Seffie screamed, anguish and fury filling her voice. “Mike!”
“He’s gone!” Miranda shouted.
Somehow, she managed to turn Seffie around. Mario and Doug were almost even with them now.
Seffie looked at Miranda blankly, as if she did not know where she was. Miranda dragged her along for a few stumbling steps before Seffie began to run for the door where Finn waited. Bolts spit from his crossbow, but zombies were no longer a concern at such close proximity to the Prophet.
Finn led them down a corridor, which opened into a small corral. Zombies pressed in from all sides, rotting arms stretching through the spaces between the slatted fence. Finn stomped on the ground. A moment later, a trapdoor opened. Dalton squinted up at them.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Doug said, shoving the shell-shocked Seffie toward the trapdoor.
Connor hopped down after Seffie. The tips of his fingers stuck out of the ground as Doug and Finn lowered the Prophet to him.
“You okay?” Miranda asked Mario, a tremor in her voice.
Mario nodded. He looked depleted, but whole. Miranda felt like crying with relief but clamped down on the impulse. She still had a job to do.
“Go,” she told him. When he started to protest, she said, “I’m right behind you.”
Mario climbed down the ladder. As Miranda followed him, Doug said to Finn, “What will you do now?”
Miranda looked up at Finn. The young man’s face was grim, but he radiated an energy of liberation long-repressed and suddenly released. His presence filled and overflowed the space around them.
“I will burn this cursed building down.”
Finn held true to his promise to help. He gave them horses and supplies, returned their weapons, and told them the best route to take. He had even remembered Delilah, who trotted alongside Miranda’s horse as if she did this sort of thing every day. The opaque silvery mists that had descended without warning only to dissipate just as abruptly, the freezing rain that never let up, the skirting and backtracking to avoid zombies that had given the journey a feeling of one step forward and two steps back—none of it had phased Doug. Doug’s tenacity, the force of his will that they would succeed, had been enough to make Miranda believe they just might pull this thing off.
Until now. First, the smell pushed their way by the northerly wind off Monterey Bay. Wet soot and smoke mingled with the stink of roasted meat. The inky-black plume became visible as soon as they emerged from the forest. And moans, always the goddamned moans, distorted by remnants of the patchy fog.
Miranda looked down at the roiling zombies in the valley below the bluff where they had stopped. At least a hundred blackened, charred corpses staggered amongst the later arrivals, whose rotted, gray pallor looked healthy by comparison. Dilapidated buildings dotted the descending hillside, remnants of the UC Santa Cruz campus. A small cluster of buildings surrounded by a concrete wall lay in ruins, belching dark smoke into the sky.
The lab, she thought, even though she had never been to the Jesuits’ secret installation on the UCSC campus. It had to be the lab. There was nothing else up here worth burning. Eight scientists and as many in the security detail. Had anyone escaped or were they all dead? Even if they could get close enough to investigate, how would they tell human skeletons from those of the undead attracted and burned up by the fire?
Several miles beyond the campus, the town of Santa Cruz sat nestled between a fortified concrete wall and the ocean. A small warship, a frigate by the looks of it, was parked halfway between the shore and the horizon. The Navy’s changeable loyalties never boded well, as the ruins below attested. Miranda could not think of a reason for them to be in Santa Cruz now, the timing could not be coincidental, unless an alliance had been struck with the Council to stop their mission.
A cold fire exploded inside Miranda’s brain. Her swelling black eye throbbed. If they had not been trapped by Jeremiah, they might have been here. They might have been able to help, to prevent this, instead of finding a smoldering wreck. They might already be at sea, bringing the vaccine to the rest of the world.
She turned away from the ruined buildings and zeroed in on Jeremiah. New Jerusalem’s recently deposed Prophet lay slung over the back of a docile mare like a sack of grain. His hands were tied together and then to his bare feet, blue from the cold, by a rope that passed under the horse’s belly. A sack over his head hid the blindfold and gag. Jeremiah had started the trip upright but had made too much noise. He didn’t need to worry about the zombies he attracted, but they did.
“This is your fault!” Miranda cried, furious. The dismount from her horse turning into a controlled fall when she had
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