“Bet those suits are uncomfortable,” Stuart said.
“Worse for the grunts.” Buck nodded at a nearby pair of soldiers. “The WHO guys probably have little air conditioners in there.”
They watched the men in white suits work, not even a little curious about what they were testing. Both were exhausted, dark circles under their eyes, unwilling to do more than stand on this hill of dirt and watch. Not that there was much for them to do. FEMA had sent them to organize disposal, which they had done. Their only job now was to wait for instructions and go where the chopper took them next.
They looked out at the field. “Still plenty of room for more,” said Stuart.
The park was a beautiful green expanse of trees, bike trails, and sports fields at the east side of the L.A. suburb. Heavy equipment had turned it into a mass grave, and this trench was the fourteenth dug and filled since daybreak.
Plenty of room. Stuart nodded slowly. It was a physical act just to keep his eyes open. They both knew there probably wouldn’t be a chance to dig and fill more trenches. The Army reported that the line was holding, but the two men had been through this yesterday in Compton. The skinnies would start slipping through the perimeter, compromising the line, and the Army would fall back or even be overwhelmed in places. It would be no different here; the only question was when. The dead were pouring out of L.A. by the tens of thousands.
Buck grimaced. “Skinnies” was a term the Army had used to refer to the local population during its ill-fated adventure in Somalia twenty-plus years earlier. Now everyone used the term, including civilians. It had gone viral, so to speak, and wasn’t that just hilarious? He supposed it was appropriate, though. As many of the walking dead decayed, they shed much of their fluid (not all, he cautioned himself—they were still juicy enough to infect you) and grew emaciated, rotting skin drawing tight against their bodies and features. It was as good a name as any.
The man with the long probe stopped to jab his device toward one of the lime-coated bodies, one that was struggling to pull itself out from under other motionless corpses. The edge of the trench suddenly collapsed, and the man tumbled in on a cascade of crumbling dirt, dropping his tool, arms flailing. His buddy ran in the other direction, waving at two of the patrolling soldiers.
Buck and Stuart didn’t move, didn’t call out. They just watched.
The man started crawling back toward the edge, his movements slow and uncoordinated in the bulky suit. The ghoul in the lime pit caught hold of one of his legs and used it to pull itself free of the other bodies. Then it scrambled onto the man’s back and began tearing at the suit. Within moments the bright red of blood splashed across the white fabric, and the man rolled onto his back in an attempt to fight off the creature. It straddled him, ripping away his mask, and then worked its face in past his raised arms, getting at the exposed flesh.
Two soldiers trotted up to the edge of the trench, raised their rifles, and fired, hitting the powdery ghoul in the head. It slumped over, and the man turned to start climbing again. One of the soldiers shifted his weapon and fired again, blowing out the back of the WHO man’s head. The bulldozer didn’t stop working.
Stuart yawned. “How much longer, do you think?”
Buck pulled away his goggles and rubbed at tired, stinging eyes. The soldiers had resumed their patrol, and the other WHO worker had not returned to the trench. “Probably tomorrow,” Buck said. “Depends on how long it takes to put the equipment on the trucks. The line should hold that long, at least.”
“North?”
“Or farther east. L.A. is done.”
They watched as a teenager covered in lime and missing an arm tried to claw its way out of the trench. The bulldozer buried it.
“I heard they might pull us back to Denver,” said Stuart.
Buck looked at his colleague. Had the man not been listening during the morning briefing, or was he just too tired to remember they had been told Denver was already gone? He was about to remind him when he saw men scrambling out of the cabs of the distant flatbeds, followed by the driver of the bucket loader. They all ran to the right. A moment later a Humvee came tearing across the soccer field, a soldier in the turret facing backward unloading a long stream of fifty-caliber rounds.
The dead had arrived. They came out of the trees to the left, surging through a playground and across a baseball field, an endless line of them, a thousand, ten thousand, more.
“Oh shit,” Buck said. “C’mon.” He tugged his friend’s sleeve and they began to run for the waiting helicopter, its turbines winding up in a loud hum, the rotor blades spinning into a blur. The FEMA men waved their arms as they ran, shouting, an army of the dead behind them.
The chopper lifted off while they were still fifty yards away and banked out over Riverside. The WHO man in the helicopter’s doorway took off his white hood and waved at the two running figures until they were out of sight.
Redding
Many considered Redding to be California’s last population center of any significant size before the Oregon border. Stephen Farro, Redding’s mayor for the past six years, stood on the sidewalk outside the small regional hospital next to his grim chief of police. A line of school buses was pulled to the curb and waiting at the entrance while hospital staff helped patients board.
“I don’t see what else you can do, Steve,” the chief said.
Farro didn’t reply. What else? He had wrestled with that question and come up with this answer. These people had all been bitten, yet not killed by their attackers. They were infected and suffering from the fever to different extents, but there was no way to reverse it. They would soon become dangerous, a threat to the citizenry. He had a responsibility to the town.
“I’ve got one of my boys waiting,” the chief said.
“Only one? Can he handle all this? Why not more?”
“It’s Andy Pope.”
Mayor Ferro looked away. He had never cared much for Andy Pope, a sly weasel of a cop who skirted right on the edge of abusing his police powers and had an obsession with both guns and violent movies. The perfect man for this job.
“He’ll do fine. And I can’t spare any more, not since the Army didn’t show up like they promised. We got sightings not only on the edge of town, but inside as well.”
The mayor looked at his chief. “We’re not contained?”
“Hell no, we’re not contained. Robbie Morris called in that he’d seen a mob of ’em coming down the off-ramp of I-5, then went off the air and didn’t respond to calls. Derrick Link went out to have a look, and we haven’t heard from him either.”
Farro looked back at the buses. The patients were being told they were being moved to a quarantine area. Instead they would be driven out to the gravel quarry where Andy Pope was eagerly waiting with a scoped assault rifle. Most were likely too weak to put up much of a fight or run very far, so it wouldn’t take long.
A woman in her forties and a girl of fourteen, both flushed and sweating, wearing pale blue hospital gowns, were about to climb the steps of a bus, and stopped when they saw Farro. “Steve?” the woman called.
The girl said, “You’ll come to see us soon, right, Daddy?”
The mayor looked away.
Sacramento
Luther and Wanda, both dressed in the light purple scrubs of orderlies (now splashed with blood), sprinted down the sidewalk, Sacramento Memorial Hospital burning behind them. Flaming bodies were walking stiffly out of the inferno and into the street. A rifle cracked several times and then went silent. Luther carried a long-handled screwdriver and Wanda a fire extinguisher, both dripping with red and gray. The orderlies were wiping madly at their faces, rubbing their eyes. That last fight in the fire stairwell had been messy.
Corpses shuffled ahead on the sidewalk. They darted right, down the cracked cement driveway of a three-story house converted to apartments, a shabby thing sagging on its foundations. The weed-choked backyard was empty, and they bolted up the rear steps and through an open kitch
en door, slamming it behind them.
The dead passed by. The orderlies found towels and scrubbed at their faces over the kitchen sink, thankful that the water was still working, gargling and spitting, rubbing some more. Then they crept upstairs, made sure it was empty, and hid in a bedroom. There was no talk about what they would do; they were too exhausted, not just from the running and fighting, but from the previous forty-eight-hour shift without sleep. Wanda passed out on the bed. Luther propped a pillow against the bedroom door and leaned back against it. He tried to sleep, but it eluded him.
He knew about the bites, about the virus and how it was transmitted. He knew about the life expectancy, and what happened after clinical death. It was the slow burn that frightened him now, the term the doctors used to refer to the condition following exposure to infected fluids, usually by way of the eyes, nose, mouth, or open wounds.
The zombie in the stairwell, the one wearing a security guard uniform . . . his head had exploded when Wanda hit him with the fire extinguisher. They both caught a face full of gore, and it had gotten into their eyes.
Slow burn. Symptoms appeared within the hour and mimicked those of an OV bite: fever, nausea, chills, delirium. It ran for twenty-four hours, the last twelve of which left the victim in a near-comatose state. A vulnerable state. At the end of the twenty-four-hour cycle, fifty percent of victims died and reanimated within minutes as the walking dead. The other half, however, awoke weak but alive, their immune system managing to fight it off.
The docs couldn’t explain it, and some proposed that the virus was somehow weakened when exposed to air, as opposed to the full dose that invariably came from fluid-to-fluid contact, as in the bites. They were excited nonetheless. Not only did it mean at least some of the infected could pull through; it gave a glimmer of hope for a possible cure. Of course, none of those excited doctors were alive anymore at Sacramento Memorial. Walking around, maybe, but not alive.
The fever came on fast. Luther threw up on himself a short while later, then began slipping in and out between the sweats and shivering. Within hours he was seeing and talking to people who weren’t there, and some time between the six- and twelve-hour marks, he fell onto his side, eyes closed, his breathing shallow and ragged.
In the bed, Wanda went through it all as well.
Nothing entered the house to disturb them for the next twenty-four hours.
Luther awoke groggy, his mouth dry and pasty. He needed water, and he had a cramp in his shoulder from lying on it for too long. He blinked and struggled back into a sitting position. He thought he might pass out from the effort, and when he didn’t, he looked around, wondering at his surroundings. It came back quickly, and he sighed, nodding slowly. He had survived the slow burn. Thank you, Jesus.
Wanda snarled and lunged off the bed.
Stockton
Things couldn’t be better for Vince. No more of his girlfriend whining for him to get a better job, no more of his asshole boss yelling when he was late, no one to tell him he was a fuckup. The world was his for the taking, and he was taking.
A bright yellow drop-top Corvette sat idling at the curb, and a pair of chromed .45s hung under his armpits in twin shoulder holsters. He had taken the guns and the car from a rich asshole in his garage. The man had been so busy loading groceries into the car that he hadn’t seen Vince creeping up behind him with a long-handled shovel. Whang! The asshole went down. Half a dozen more hits to the head made sure he wasn’t getting up again.
He’d burned a couple inches of rubber off the Vette’s tires tear-assing around Stockton, screeching to a stop when he saw a skinny. He’d then hopped up onto the back of the seat and blazed away with the twins until it went down. He wasn’t worried about ammo. The rich asshole had boxes and boxes of it in a bag behind the driver’s seat. No cops hit him with lights and sirens, no one yelled for him to stop, to quit being such a fuckup. Stockton was a ghost town. It was his town.
A trip to a jewelry store and a smashed case put gold around his neck and diamonds on his fingers. Now for the big score. He faced a pair of glass doors, grinned, and shouted, “My town!” as he heaved a cinder block through one of them. Vince stepped into the Bank of America and flipped off the cameras as he strode across the lobby carrying a handful of empty pillowcases and a crowbar.
“Will you be making a withdrawal today, sir?” He hopped the counter. “Why, yes I will, fuck you very much.” The cash drawers gave little resistance, and soon he was filling the pillowcases with tightly wrapped bundles of joy.
Vince held a strap of hundreds up to one of the cameras. “My town, fuckers!”
The purple dye pack exploded six inches from his face.
Screaming and blind, Vince clawed his way over the counter and stumbled toward the brightest point of light he could make out, the front doors. His noise drew attention, and the skinnies caught him on the sidewalk.
He never saw it coming.
Malibu
Claire Mercer was twenty-two, Hollywood beautiful (tucks, Botox, and implants that had healed nicely) and on her way to becoming a star. Midnight Beauty was red-hot: gorgeous, pampered, twenty-somethings filled with angst falling in and out of love and danger with equally hip vampires. After coming in midway through the season and getting smash reviews, she had been signed as a regular for next year and handed a fat contract. Those first paychecks had made for a nice down payment on the beach house.
Her agent was already talking movie deals, maybe a perfume line.
The flu (the real flu, not that other crazy shit that was going around) had kept her in bed and out of touch with the world for days. She had turned off her cell, disconnected the house phone, and spent her time on the edge of the tub, puking into the bowl, or curled up and shivering under the blankets. She felt like dying, and didn’t want to talk to anyone. Out of touch was what she got, and she missed some important news.
Now she stood in her living room, an impressive view of the beach and the Pacific beyond rows of tall windows, wearing vomit-stained pink pajamas and holding a butcher knife. The dead were smashing their way through all that glass, moaning and tumbling into the house. Claire stood and screamed.
Her agent would have been proud. It was a horror star’s scream.
Palm Springs
Gloria tried to steer and fight off her husband at the same time, stomping the brakes and cranking the wheel hard to the left, into their driveway. Gravity threw him and his snapping teeth away from her (and threw her snarling teenage son across the backseat) long enough for her to crash the Volvo into the side of the house.
The air bags deployed, saving her from a spinal injury, and pinning her undead husband against his seat.
Gloria fumbled for the handle and fell out onto the driveway, her nose broken and bleeding from the air bag, and ran for the house, sobbing. Her husband and son managed to get out too, and lurched after her, but she made it inside and slammed the front door, locking it. They pounded the wood, flinging their bodies against it, as Gloria backed into her front room, hands over her mouth and shaking her head.
All they had wanted to do was stock up on groceries and bottled water, but the supermarket parking lot was like an asylum, people wrestling carts away from each other, pushing and hitting. It was like hell’s version of Black Friday. Then those two things tried to crawl through the open side windows and tore into her boys. Gloria got them out of there in the Volvo, but they died on the way home. For a while.
Father and son groaned and hammered at the door, and Gloria sat down to cry.
An hour later a pair of rifle shots rang out from the street, and the pounding stopped. A bullhorn voice echoed through the neighborhood. “This is the United States Marines. All civilians are being evacuated to Twenty-Nine Palms. Come to the sound of my voice, and wave something white over your head. Any persons not waving white will be shot. This will be the only evacuation of this neighborhood.”
Gloria heard a line of trucks rumbling past but made no move to go outside. W
hen they were gone, she got out her photo albums and spent an hour looking through them, crying softly. Then she drew a warm bath and placed a razor blade on the marble edge before getting undressed.
Madera
Their skin was brown to begin with, but years of working in the sun, moving between orchards and farms and being outside in all sorts of weather, had turned it to creased leather. They were people with little interest in their political status, other than avoiding deportation, which was no longer a concern. For them there had been only work and family.
There were seven families, more than fifty people, and they kept to the rural roads, fading into the fields at the first sign of a vehicle or los muertos. They knew how to hide, how to stay quiet. They moved like ghosts.
Ricardo and Miguel walked in the lead, their wives and children in the group behind, everyone keeping up and no one complaining. Theirs had always been a life of labor, a hard life doing the work the gringos didn’t want to do. They had little and thus had little to lose, so this new life was simply another obstacle to overcome.
When los muertos couldn’t be avoided, Ricardo and Miguel and the other men swiftly fell upon them with machetes, putting them down fast without drawing attention. Many of the women also carried machetes, spades, and knives as well, for they had children to protect. Like their men, they did not shy away from hard work.
The town of Madera was behind them now, and the group moved across a tall bean field that they or people they knew might have planted. Staying in single file, they walked quietly down the long rows. Soon they would turn south, their only plan to return to their families and whatever homes awaited them in Mexico. That was as much tomorrow as they considered. They gathered food and water as they went and packed themselves into drainage culverts at night to sleep, posting guards at each end, moving again at dawn. In the evenings the women prayed the rosary, asking the Blessed Mother to watch over their families.
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