The Dead Won't Die by Joe McKinney

couldn’t go through that again, either.
    â€œChelsea,” Kelly said, “can you come down here, sweetie? We need to figure this out.”
    â€œThere’s nothing to figure out,” Chelsea said. She charged down the stairs. “Why can’t you two hear what I’m saying? There’s nothing to figure out. I’m going to take these notebooks to my aunt Miriam, and she’s going to figure out how to save my father’s name.”
    â€œBut you don’t even know whether your aunt will help you,” Kelly said.
    â€œShe has to. She has to, don’t you see? She has to.”
    â€œChelsea, please, don’t shriek at me.”
    â€œI’m not shrieking!”
    Chelsea stopped there. Kelly tried to put a hand on her arm, but Chelsea pushed her away.
    â€œDon’t you see? She has to help. If she doesn’t, I’ve got nowhere else to go. I’ll be ruined. She has to help.”
    Kelly frowned. “What do you mean, you’ll be ruined? I thought you said you had your father’s fortune to fall back on.”
    Chelsea was crying, not even trying to hold back the tears. “I lied, okay? Are you happy with that? I lied. They’ve locked up my father’s accounts and seized the money. I got a few thousand BCs out of the bank before it happened, but not enough to live on. They destroyed my father’s name, and now they’ve left me with nothing.”
    Kelly looked confused. “But, Chelsea, why would you lie about something like that?”
    â€œBecause I didn’t think you’d help me otherwise.”
    Kelly glanced back at Jacob for just a second, and in that moment he saw so much of the girl he’d known way back in their younger years. He saw her kindness, and her ability to adapt, to forgive, to make bridges out of blasted roads. It was strange, he thought, how he’d been forced to travel halfway across the continent, and across two decades, to see that girl again. But that was the way of things, wasn’t it? You had to go far afield to remember where you lived.
    Kelly went after Chelsea. “Oh sweetie,” she said. “Come here.”
    But Jacob had had enough of the touchy-feely crap, and he didn’t trust himself to speak again. Not without starting up the screaming match all over again. He went to the rear of the compartment and sulked. Let the two of them work their shit out, if they could.
    He doubted it, though.
    In the meantime, he’d sit in the dark and figure out how in the hell they were going to get back home. Texas was eight hundred miles across from border to border. That meant eight hundred miles, on foot, while fighting their way through the Great Texas Herd.
    Wasn’t going to happen.
    And they couldn’t just go to the authorities. The authorities were the ones looking to kill them.
    Which left—
    The door at the top of the stairs hissed open, breaking his thoughts off clean. A man appeared there, wearing yellow overalls with blue sleeves and a blue hard hat. He was holding a wrench in his hand, and looking like he had every intention of using it to bash somebody’s head in.
    â€œWhat’s going on in here?” he demanded.
    Kelly and Chelsea put their hands up and started backing down the stairs.
    â€œWhat are you doing in here?” the man said. “Who are you people?”
    Goddammit, Jacob thought. Was this really how it was going to be? Was this really how his luck was going to run?
    He pulled one of the pistols from behind his back and hustled toward the stairs. The man was still coming down the stairs, the wrench held low.
    â€œWho the hell are—”
    He didn’t finish the rest of his sentence. Jacob stepped between the two women and pointed the pistol right between the man’s eyes.
    The man made a startled, strangled sound.
    â€œYou don’t have to die today,” Jacob said. “But I will kill you if you don’t