Dead World Resurrection: The Collected Zombie Short Stories of Joe McKinney by Joe McKinney

Author:Joe McKinney [McKinney, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2014-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

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“All stop!” Fisher shouted.

The expedition ground to a halt. They’d been walking for hours, and the clattering and clanking and whirring of a full company of robots had made a tremendous racket that even now, in the sudden silence that followed the captain’s command, continued to ring in Jimmy Finder’s ears.

But the ringing only lasted a moment. Once the racket faded, the pulsing images of the dead flooded back into his brain. The town was definitely not clear. He could sense hundreds of pulses going off all around him, like he was standing in the middle of a huge orchestra made of nothing but big bass drums, all of them pounding out a violent and relentless and tuneless rhythm.

He groaned in misery, wanting only to curl up in his hammock and fall asleep. Going outside like this, with nothing to shield him from all those morphic pulses, was crippling. Dr. Knopf had tried to teach him a few tricks to get rid of the pain, like focusing on a single thought-presence and letting everything else fall away, but most of the tricks were too hard to do outside of the lab. And right now, he could barely open his eyes his head hurt so badly.

I can’t do this, he thought.

James.

Jimmy stiffened in alarm. He looked around, uncertain who was talking to him. He was surrounded by Troopbots. They had no faces, only curved, featureless metal plates that they turned toward their human masters whenever they needed to speak or were spoken to, but none of them were looking at him now. They stood like statues, tall and mute in the settling dust and gloom of evening.

And there were no humans anywhere around him. Dr. Knopf and the soldiers had moved to the shade of the portico of a deserted gas station, talking in hushed tones. Knopf wasn’t even looking in his direction.

It is you, isn’t it? My God, how long I’ve waited!

That time the voice was so strong it caused his eyes to fly open. The hairs on the back of his were standing on end, as though from static electricity. He could feel the blood rush to his head. He was dizzy, his cheeks flushed with an uncomfortable heat. It wasn’t just a voice, he realized, but a thought. A thought with weight, with force behind it.

The sensation didn’t last long, though. The dizziness faded. A cold sweat replaced the heat on his cheeks. He had a real, almost tangible sense of the contact fading. The next instant, all trace of the link―yes, that was it; it had been a link he felt, like another mind wrapping its grip around his mind―echoed away, leaving him confused and somehow vulnerable.

Again he looked around.

No one was paying him any attention.

He cocked his head to one side, trying to make sense of what he had just felt. Dr. Knopf had always said his power was of a class known as remote viewing. He could sense zombies, locate them with a degree of precision the machines couldn’t even begin to approach, but only that.

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