unconscious, and Jackson knew there was no way in hell the doctor had bashed it that way. No doubt he’d shot it to shit with something.
“How did it get in?” Luke asked, before Jackson could. “I thought after last time…”
Nancy scowled and walked across the room to look at the zombie. “We found something odd today when we swept the northern end of camp.”
“What?” Jackson asked.
Nancy scowled some more. “We might even have missed it the first time around for fuck’s sake. Who knew to look for that?”
“What?” Jackson repeated.
Nancy tucked her hands in her jean pockets. “A hole.”
“A hole?” Luke asked, breaking the silence that had fallen with those words. “Where? In what? One of the gates?”
“Not the gates, no,” Nancy said. “I wish.”
“Then where?”
“In the ground.”
Nancy turned at Jackson’s hushed words, shock on her face. “How the fuck do you know that?”
Jackson frowned, her heart giving a little thump. The words had just tumbled from her lips, but the more she thought about them the more she knew she was right. Images flashed through her mind. Creepyville. Sammy’s trap. “I’ve seen it before, more than once,” she said slowly, her throat suddenly dry. “At the time it just struck me as odd, but now…”
“What?” Nancy prompted. “What?”
Jackson bent down to look at the zombie and noticed the patches of mud covering it, just like Sammy. “I wonder if maybe they’re…burrowing…”
Sebastian gasped. “That’s…well…that’s impossible. They do need oxygen you know, not to mention they would be deliberately trapping themselves.”
“Only if they went too far down, and they could be working in tandem, one burrows, the other removes the dirt. Like tunneling or something.” Jackson shrugged. “It’s just a theory. But every time I’ve seen those burrows the place where they’ve been has been some sort of trap. Almost like they’re creating dens or something.”
“Fascinating,” Sebastian said. “Adapting their behavior to hunt their food.” He paused and picked up a notebook and pen. “I’ll have to start smothering them, see how long they can last without oxygen.”
Luke shook his head at the other man. “That is completely fucked-up.”
“It’s necessary—”
“Necessary or not you need to follow that hole,” Jackson said. “Follow it to the end.”
Nancy gaped. “You expect me to ask one of our people to go down a fucking zombie burrow—Jesus, I can’t believe I’m even saying those words—and see what’s there? Are you serious?”
“You’ll have to,” Jackson insisted. “You need to see where it comes out.”
“She’s right,” Luke agreed. “You’ll need to fill both ends.”
Nancy stepped back from the cage, pulled her hands from her pockets, and ran them over her hair, smoothing the stray bits back in place. “This creates a real problem.”
“If they did it twice…”
“Then they’ll do it again,” she snapped. “We’re surrounded by mud! We grow all our food in the fucking mud! How far are they burrowing?”
“No way to know until you find the other end of that hole,” Luke said. “Let’s hope it’s not too far.”
“I would imagine it isn’t,” Sebastian said, as he scribbled something down. “A few meters at most. Which means they are somehow sneaking as close as possible to the perimeter and then burrowing in. That’s what she probably did, and now that you mention it,” excitement filled his eyes, “it would explain why she is covered in dirt.”
“And why Sammy was,” Nancy breathed, her eyes meeting Jackson, realization dawning.
“Did she say anything about a burrow?” Luke asked.
Nancy bent down so she too was able to get a good look at the zombie. “No, but she’s had some difficulties since the incident and Mack doesn’t want her being shook up again, so I can’t ask a lot. She isn’t even telling us how they communicated with her. It’s like her mind’s blanked it out.”
“I can understand why Mack wants her to have some space,” Jackson said. “Especially if the zombies dragged her through a hole in the ground. She must have been terrified.”
Her heart clenched as that thought. They’d seen Sammy a few times over the last few days and Luke in particular seemed to have taken a real liking to her—no surprise there, he’d have made a great dad if the world hadn’t ended. Jackson enjoyed spending time with her too. She was a sweet little thing, and that moment in the garage had created a bond of sorts which both intrigued and terrified her. Luke and Tye were the only people in the past months that she’d allowed to get really close and the idea of letting little Sammy have a piece of her heart worried Jackson. The girl had nearly died once. It could easily happen again. Still, she was no trouble to spend time with, though whether the girl had been so quiet before the zombies had kidnapped her was something Jackson couldn’t answer. She certainly was now. But many of the children around the camp had that air to them. Watchful, considering. Jackson couldn’t even begin to imagine how it would feel being raised in the world of the waking dead.
Silence reigned in the room for a moment as everyone followed Nancy’s example, craning their necks to get a good look at the zombie. Sebastian was the first to speak.
“Entry method aside, she’s an impressive specimen, I must say.” He turned to Jackson, pulling some of his hair as he did so. “And think about it, Jack, now that Two-h-ee is pretty much done for, we can start on her. You won’t need to go and find one. We’ll call her Two-h-four, or maybe Red. So really, it’s a stroke of luck.”
“Are you serious?” Luke asked, gaping at the other man. “We have a real situation here—zombies coming out of the fucking ground like some sort of old-school horror movie—and you’re lining up your next lab rat? Giving it a nickname?”
Sebastian grinned. “Just looking for the silver lining. Besides, I can joke if I want. I woke up to find her standing over me, looking at me funny, I might add. I barely had time to grab the syringe before she took a chunk from me.”
“You did good, Seb,” Nancy said. “Very good.”
“It was instinct more than anything,” Sebastian replied. “I know, compared to the rest of you, I’m seen as a bit of a wimp. But I haven’t survived this long without taking out a few myself!”
Jackson snorted. “You’ve killed hundreds in the lab.” She’d looked through his files during the time they spent at the shack, and though she didn’t really understand the science behind his work, the roll call of dead zombies was impressive. One after the other he had captured them, worked on them, and then, once they were dead, discarded them. In many ways, Sebastian was as deadly as she. Only his weapon of choice was a syringe rather than a machete.
He shrugged. “Not quite the same thing, Jack.”
“Ummm.”
Jackson walked over to the zombie, surprised how calm she felt, considering. Sure it was unconscious but she didn’t even lift her blade, just sort of gripped it to her. She wondered if this was due to being used to Sebastian’s lab, around Two-h-ee. Listening to it groan and gag from whatever Sebastian fed it. At times, though she didn’t dare say so to Luke, or even really think about it after the fact, Two-h-ee seemed almost normal. Once when Sebastian had pumped it full of stuff and it had tried to curl in on itself it had seemed sort of vulnerable— ridiculous though that sounded. Jackson recalled the time the doctor had gone into the other room to get more chemicals or something. Two-h-ee had spent the previous hour screaming in what she assumed must be pain, though she’d never seen them do that before. The moment Sebastian left the room its screams had ceased and it turned its head on the table to look at her. Jackson’s gaze had held his, because there was no fucking way she was backing down from one of the bastards, and she’d waited for the usual hatred to rise, but it hadn’t. Her old moral dilemma had instead.
Its eyes had been filled with something that, for once, wasn’t hunger, and she remembered how it had once been a person, how it wasn’t even really dead. It groaned and shifted and its eyes begged for something. Part of her had wondered if that something might be death at last and she’d been tempted to simply finish it off,
