Dead City

by Sean Platt

  “Just for check-ins. It just shows if you have enough Necrophage in your system.”

  “Like a drug test.”

  “Sort of, yes, ma’am.” He stopped, not wanting to rush on and seem rude. But when Jordache put her finger in her mouth — maybe looking a bit sexier than he was comfortable with — he just tipped his head and wished her a nice day. Then he moved on to bother Peggy, as well as the other infected residents of Sunny Day.

  A bit later, after she’d cleaned up and applied fresh makeup, Danny’s shiny black car pulled into the spot out front. Jordache hurried, grabbing her purse. It was a real Pretty Woman thing, when he came in his nice ride, but she didn’t want him coming in. His car, which was a total mess inside, proved he was grounded. But even though Danny knew where she lived and had seen how nicely she kept her small place, Jordache still didn’t like reminding him of her station. He had money — more than he should, for sure. And although she wanted to be proud, it wasn’t always easy.

  “Where we goin’?” Jordache asked Danny, opening his passenger door and dodging an empty McDonald’s Big Mac box that tumbled out from inside.

  Danny’s smile came slowly.

  “First, we need to get some pancakes,” he said. “After that, I have something to tell you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  PURGATORY

  “THIS WAY,” SAID THE MAN in the hat.

  Bobby looked over, crouched behind a large boulder, shaking his head.

  “What, you don’t believe me?”

  “You just don’t know the land. Even if the trail does go that way, we can cut to the chase by heading up to the bluff.”

  “Why did you bother to bring me here if you don’t trust my ability to track, Bobby?”

  “Don’t get offended, Cam. I’m just letting you know something you don’t about this particular hunt. I believe you if you say he went that way. But that’s toward Purgatory Valley.”

  “Where the new ones are dropped off?”

  “Where they funnel into after they’re dropped off, yes. Ferals never go there. Something they smell, if I had to guess. But there’s a ridge in that direction, and there’s only one way it can go other than Purgatory, and it’s to a bluff farther east. If you want to follow the path, we’ll waste hours. But if we go right to where he’s headed anyway, maybe we can cut him off.”

  “How do you figure?” Cam seemed to realize he was speaking too loudly, so he squatted and lowered his voice. Bobby could see the trampled vegetation sneaking out onto the ridge past Cam. Deadheads weren’t subtle, and picking up trails through brush wasn’t hard. It was the details that could be tricky: things like recentness through an area, how many were traveling, their gait and/or health (if there was such a thing for deadheads), and speed. That’s why Cam was here.

  “It’s a hard path. Narrow. Perilous. It’ll take him a lot longer to reach the bluff than us, if we go around.”

  “Maybe he’ll fall to his death.”

  Bobby shook his head. “Not Golem.”

  “You said he was two years dead.”

  “He is. But he’s special.”

  Cam raised an eyebrow. He was Bobby’s friend — a professional hunter and tracker, a flat-out mercenary, based on what the company was paying him. But he was also officially Panacea, and couldn’t stop thinking about containment.

  “Special?”

  “They’re not totally mindless, Cam. You should know that.”

  “I don’t know that at all. I believe they are the very definition of mindless.”

  “They’re like animals. Not intelligent in the ways we are, but intelligent in a few base, primal ways. They’ll run right at guns, but they know what’s meat and what’s not.”

  “That’s not smarts. That’s survival. And shit, Bobby. They’re not picky. They’ll eat meat that’s been dead for a year.”

  “And then they always find something fresh immediately after,” Bobby countered. “They might not know that the old, winter-preserved meat isn’t giving them what they need, but their bodies do. They need protein or something.”

  “So they get hungry,” said Cam. “Color me impressed.”

  “All I’m saying is that if you walked that path and he walked it, I’m betting on him to survive it over you. Even slouching along like they do. Maybe it keeps them lower to the ground. Lets them use their arms to stabilize.”

  “Until their arms rot off,” Cam grumbled.

  Bobby rolled his eyes. They didn’t all rot to the core, and Cam damn well knew it. Sherman Pope mattered because it strengthened a body that should know well enough to stay dead.

  Cam moved forward, down the path. He peeked out then turned to Bobby.

  “Your path. To the left?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “This goes straight.”

  “It’ll hook back.”

  “I see your hook-back. I see your deadhead’s footprints past it.”

  “Footprints?”

  “Christ, Bobby, yes. Look for yourself.”

  Bobby followed Cam and peeked through the fork, where the ridge continued on to the left. Straight ahead, on the easier of the paths, was an obvious line of shuffling footprints. Headed toward Purgatory Valley.

  “He went into the valley?” Bobby said, aghast.

  “Why is that so crazy?”

  “They never go into the valley.”

  “But why wouldn’t they? They don’t think. You act like they do. Shit, Bobby. I say this to you as a friend, but you’ve been out here too long. When’s the last time you stayed out of the park for more than a week?”

  “Last month.”

  Cam sighed. “You were still in the park.”

  “In the cleared section!”

  “Come on. You climbed El Capitan so you could see into the reserve from above. First time anyone’s ever done a climb like that for utilitarian reasons. I swear, your brain is getting infected in here. Like you’re breathing the shit. They’re fucking zombies, Bobby. This one you’re after? This fool’s errand you’re on? It’s become an obsession. For your own good, when I get back, I’m calling in favors. Get Calais to dispatch someone to take it out. And then you’ll never be able to say I never assassinated anyone for you. You’re welcome.”

  Bobby didn’t give Cam the dignity of a response. He had a good one, though. The truth was that at some point, Golem’s tracker had stopped relaying information. Officially, the brass who’d return Bobby’s calls said that the early chips were flaky and that it’d probably been smashed against a rock in a deadhead fit or saturated with decayed body fluids. The most interesting hypothesis involved Golem losing his hand to rot or an animal attack and the hand subsequently dropping to the bottom of a lake. But regardless, the only official evidence that Golem was still out there came from Bobby’s own eyes — and, sometimes, cameras. Good luck calling someone to take him out, if nobody knew where he was.

  Not for the first time, hearing his own thoughts, Bobby wondered if Cam and the others were right. Maybe he was obsessed. Just because you could manage something wasn’t reason enough to pull out all the stops of rationality to do it. The expression said that mountain climbers climbed “because it’s there,” but Bobby’s obsession piggybacked on that one. He’d climbed not because El Capitan was there, but in order to better see the true object of his attention.

  Bobby sighed. He pushed past Cam, knowing he was losing even the tracker’s paid attention. Cam would do what he’d been hired to do, but little more. Being Bobby’s friend didn’t mean he’d stay on the job. Being his friend made him more likely to bail after today, for Bobby’s own good.

  They headed through the fork, down the hill’s slow decline. As Cam had said, the loose, sandy surface was clearly marked with recent footprints. They were huge, like a professional basketball player’s. If they weren’t Golem’s, they were the Incredible Hulk’s.

  “He’s never come down here before,” Bobby said. “Not since the beginning. None of them have.”

>   “First time for everything. Maybe he was homesick.”

  Bobby gave Cam an annoyed glance, feeling patronized. That was one nice thing about spending time with Alice Frank: She was a veteran as far as deadheads and necrotics were concerned, but she’d been a Yosemite virgin. It was the perfect mix. New enough to be shocked and impressed, but knowledgeable enough to appreciate what was happening. She hadn’t condescended to Bobby. She’d looked up to him, duly fascinated by his theories rather than feeling pity because he had them.

  The slight thrumming that had been in the background for the past hour became slightly louder. Bobby looked up, annoyed. The sky here could be big if you were high enough and the area was clear enough, but Purgatory Valley — empty now, as there hadn’t been a recent drop-off — was the opposite. The sky here was much smaller, and Bobby’s rule was that he’d tolerate the helicopter’s presence as long as he couldn’t see it and it didn’t scare away the deadheads. The latter was easy; deadheads didn’t scare much. But he could see the damned blades, creating an arc of gray at the corner of the sky.

  “Tell that fucking thing to give us some space,” Bobby said.

  Cam looked like he might protest, maybe pointing out that cover couldn’t be blown when your prey didn’t have more than a semblance of a brain. But instead he pulled out his walkie and spoke into it. The helicopter moved back just enough to comply.

  “I’ve been hunting a long time, Cam. I don’t need to be babysat.”

  Cam looked like he might disagree. The helicopter had been Cindy’s idea. She’d blamed it on Cam’s newness to hunting human prey and the uncertainties involved, but really it was an excuse. Bobby wasn’t an idiot. He was ratings gold, but there had been whispers lately. He couldn’t keep raking in the sponsorships if he got killed doing something stupid, like letting his wild goose chase get the best of him.

  “Let’s go,” Bobby said.

  After a moment, Cam moved to take the lead, studying the rather obvious trail before Bobby could ruin it. But he didn’t need Cam for this; Golem, for reasons unknown, had rolled out the red carpet.

  Soon, they found themselves on the Purgatory Valley floor, just north of the rudimentary huts that had seemed to make Alice so sad. The rescue ’copter was out of sight, but with their feet stilled its sound was as obnoxious to Bobby as an insect’s buzzing.

  “That way,” Cam said, pointing.

  Toward the huts.

  They moved down. The valley wasn’t narrow, but the land did roll upward on both sides. During periods of heavy rain, there was an impromptu river through the center of Purgatory Valley, and Bobby, with mixed emotions, had watched the doomed drink from it. He hated running into grazers and was thankful they hadn’t seen any today. They tended to hole up, still possessing enough sense for self-preservation. But when they neared the rage point, most of them came out. That was when things got tricky. It was only legal to shoot deadheads that attacked, meaning that a good offense, inside the reserve, was definitely not the best defense. You couldn’t precisely hunt as a Yosemite hunter; that’s what he’d tried to explain to Alice. You had to stalk, startle, then shoot back before the prey managed to kill you first.

  They reached the huts. Below was a narrower section of valley the sometimes-river had carved in the hills, and that was unfailingly the way the doomed went as their minds departed and they left their shelters. Above was the trailhead that circled out onto the ridge to the bluff.

  Cam was studying the ground, frowning.

  “What?” Bobby asked.

  “He didn’t continue on that way. He … ”

  Bobby’s head perked up. He’d heard it too.

  Then he heard something else, from the other side.

  “He’s here,” Cam whispered.

  But Bobby knew the park far better than Cam did. He knew the way sounds echoed. And even with the goddamned helicopter overhead providing auditory cover for the deadheads, Bobby knew full well that there were more around them than Golem.

  Another thing Bobby knew, that Cam didn’t, was that Purgatory Valley was one of the single most difficult spots to land a ’copter, or even approach with one.

  The color had drained from Cam’s face. He was holding the walkie, but it was merely crackling with news from above, broadcasting something that Bobby had already figured out.

  Bobby lifted his gun from its strap and moved it up to his eye, willing his breath to slow.

  “They surrounded us,” Cam whispered.

  “Put away that radio,” Bobby said, swinging the barrel as he waited for the hiding deadheads to show themselves, “and raise your fucking weapon.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  VIOLATIONS

  YOU’RE BEING RIDICULOUS.

  BRIDGET KNEW that, of course. Repeating it inside her mind changed nothing and was just the sort of neener-neener thing her brain never did as a spontaneous college kid, started doing when she’d become a mom, and now only ceased again with a little pharmaceutical help. You’re being ridiculous — along with other goodies like I’m sure it’s nothing, It’ll be fine, and the simple Relax — were anti-affirmations in affirmations’ clothing. Self-help murmurings that created the opposite feeling of what they were intended to.

  You’re being ridiculous was something Bridget only heard herself thinking when she was reasonably sure she wasn’t being ridiculous at all.

  And It’ll be fine was something she only thought when she was almost positive that things were miles from fine.

  But this time, she felt reasonably sure that, past experiences aside, she truly was being ridiculous.

  Maybe it was the Zen.

  Maybe she’d been taking too much. Gabriella sometimes took three of the little pills in a day, but she was hardly a proper girl’s role model. Gabriella had affairs because she deserved them, because her husband was always away, and because they “strengthened her marriage.” Seeing as the excuses didn’t work as a coherent whole (was she more into strengthening her marriage or getting her due for deserving it?), Bridget, hearing them, smelled rationalization. Because Gabriella believed what served her best, and what she wanted to believe.

  Bridget had always thought that Zen made those little lies easier to believe.

  Forget about self-murmuring; drugs would make everything better.

  Or so she thought, before Gabriella had finally convinced her to give one of the pills a shot. And it had been nice. For a while, there’d been no worry whatsoever. She’d felt perfectly balanced. She hadn’t been zoned out and careless, nor had she been a bundle of nerves. No wonder Zen was so expensive, not technically available to people like Bridget except on the suburban black market — it performed exactly as promised, with zero side effects.

  But now she was taking one a day. Because why not? It wasn’t a bad drug. It was safe. Just something to take the edge off.

  It dulled the edge so effectively, in fact, that Bridget didn’t particularly want to go through days without her mother’s little helper.

  She wasn’t addicted.

  She enjoyed being calm.

  Except that a few times lately, she’d had doubts — like right now. Looking at the house phone, repeating to herself that she was being ridiculous … which meant that a rather large part of Bridget was sure she wasn’t being ridiculous at all.

  Maybe Zen was making her too used to … well … a state of Zen. And maybe she had lost the ability to deal with something as simple as a woman calling for her husband.

  Never mind that the phone was bundled into the home’s base network package, accessible only via a long computer address because they’d never bothered to get a real number. They both had mobiles, and even Ana had been carrying a cell since her last birthday. There was no need to establish a number. The phone sat there, costing nothing extra, available as a failsafe to call out in an emergency.

  You’re being ridiculous, Bridget. If Ian was trying to keep something from you, why would he give out the home telephone … well, it’s not even
a number, is it?

  If Ian didn’t want Bridget to know about a female caller, he would use his cell.

  Except that Bridget paid the bills and saw his call log. That’s a tip Gabriella had given her when encouraging Bridget to experiment with an affair of her own — something she’d never considered, other than in the most distant, quickly dismissible what if sort of way. It seemed safe to have your lover call your cell, but all those calls appeared on the bill. And what if he called during dinner and you’d forgotten to turn off your phone?

  Best to get a second mobile.

  And pay for it separately.

  Except that it was one more expense to track (an expense certain husbands might notice), so why not forward the home phone line to a new cell? It supposedly wasn’t hard to do and was almost entirely invisible. Bridget hadn’t looked into it much because she wasn’t going to have any affairs. But maybe Ian had.

  And then he’d forgotten to forward the calls so it’d ring right here in the house? Don’t be stupid, Bridget.

  That was logical thinking, sure. But then why had the woman hung up when Bridget had answered, shocked that the phone had rung at all?

  Why had she hung up twice? The first time, she asked for Ian before breaking the connection — sounding decidedly nervous, eager to find him fast. But the second time, she’d just hung up. It had to be the same person.

  The same woman.

  Bridget picked up her cell and called Ian. No answer.

  Because he was at work, of course. Where else would he be? Never mind that he could slip out at any time. Never mind that he’d been working late more often. Never mind that he broke his own rule and took a work call at home. Never mind that he’d clearly been keeping something from her earlier then had grown nervous about something (possibly something incriminating) he might have lost. Never mind that after dinner, he’d closed himself in his study. With the lights down, as if to set a mood.

  He’s just working hard. That’s all.

  Bridget walked the upstairs hallway, paused at their bedroom, and cast her gaze toward the corner where, if she entered, she’d find the master bathroom.