Free The Dead Won't Die by Joe McKinney Page B

dad.”
    â€œBut I thought your dad didn’t have any friends left here,” Kelly said.
    â€œHe doesn’t. But he was a wealthy man. We have all the money we need. What we don’t have is a lot of time.” She nodded toward the black glass globes on the ceiling. “See those? Those are video cameras. This whole place is being watched. And if those men work for Lester Brooks, they’ll have access to facial recognition software. It’ll only be a matter of time before they show up here.”
    â€œHow long?” Jacob asked.
    â€œHow should I know?” Chelsea said. “Could be ten minutes from now, could be right now. But that’s not our only problem. Come over here and watch this.”
    She led them to the video monitors.
    Every screen played a news feed in some foreign language. He couldn’t understand any of them. But the images needed no translation. He saw teeming masses of ragged zombies, thousands of them, advancing through ruined suburban streets like rivers, devouring everything in their path. Aircraft, similar to the ones that had hunted them just a few hours earlier, circled overhead. The camera panned back, revealing a tide of living dead that stretched far off into the distance, and Jacob realized that what he was seeing was just the tip of some gigantic iceberg. He’d never seen so many zombies, even in the pictures they’d shown him back in school of the First Days.
    â€œKelly,” he said, pointing at the monitor.
    She was looking at a different monitor, but it displayed an image much the same as what he was seeing. She nodded, too stricken to speak.
    To his left, two bearded men were pointing at the screens and talking loudly in yet another language he didn’t recognize. He could tell they were angry, though.
    A lot of people watching the monitors looked angry, in fact.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” he said to Chelsea. “What is this?”
    â€œThat’s El Paso,” Chelsea said. “The outskirts of it, anyway. The Technology Yards are closer in to the center of town, behind the defenses. The city’s been put on lockdown. All travel in and out has been cancelled.”
    â€œSo we’re stuck here?” Kelly said. She gestured at the crowd gathered around the monitors. “Is that what all these people are so angry about?”
    â€œWith good reason,” Chelsea said. “Those zombies you see there, that’s just a satellite of the Great Texas Herd. My father used to say that was the biggest herd in the world. He said they were more than a hundred million strong.”
    â€œBut I don’t understand,” Jacob said. “When we were being held by Mother Jane and her family, we saw one of those aerofluyts steer a giant herd away from the camp. Can’t they do that here?”
    â€œThey tried that already.” Chelsea pointed at a pretty young Asian woman in a red suit, her image superimposed over an aerial image of a slowly advancing zombie horde. “That’s what this newswoman is saying. The Newton has already made multiple sweeps overhead. Ordinarily, an aerofluyt’s morphic field generator can be used to shepherd herds wherever you want them to go, but it’s not working.”
    Chelsea turned back to the monitor and listened for a moment.
    â€œNow she’s saying that El Paso has been attacked before, but always by satellite herds, never like this. Their automated defenses have held in the past, but they don’t think they can handle a herd this size. They’re directing all personnel into the tunnels beneath the city.”
    â€œThey’ve got aircraft,” Jacob said. “Why don’t they just fire-bomb them from the air? With the technology you people have, you could wipe them out in minutes.”
    â€œBe quiet,” Chelsea said in a stage whisper. “People will hear you.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo, we don’t have a military here