“Where’s Tanya?” Angie asked as she slapped in a new clip and collected her empty magazines, shoving them in vest pockets.
The insurance man made a face. “She said she had to get cigarettes for Maxie.”
Angie cursed and put the Galil back to her shoulder, resuming her position at the trash can, picking targets and dropping them. More staggered in from the street, from between nearby buildings and around both corners of the grocery store. A short Hispanic woman. A housewife missing most of her face. A dad still wearing an empty, dark-stained baby carrier on his chest.
The Galil cycled rounds, and they all went down.
A kindergartener with a bowl cut of black hair wearing shorts and a Hello Kitty T-shirt trudged across the lot, bumping against a shopping cart. Angie put the assault rifle’s sights on her.
Touched the trigger.
Hesitated.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and blew out a breath, then opened them and sighted again. The little one walked with one shoulder slumped lower than the other, small sneakers scraping over the pavement in jerky steps.
Angie touched the trigger again.
And didn’t fire.
She gritted her teeth and shifted to a high school kid in a yellow Polo shirt, putting one through his eye.
There was a long scream from inside the store. Margaret and Mark the insurance guy froze, each holding a case of water. Angie swore again and dropped another corpse, then ran inside. Tanya was running out, a canvas messenger bag hung across her chest and sprayed red. She was crying and had a hand clamped to her other, bloody forearm.
“She bit me! She bit me!” Tanya screamed.
Angie grabbed her. “Where?”
Tanya shook her head, her breath going in and out much too fast. “Bit me, oh, God, she bit me!”
A moan came from the shadowy interior on the left, and Angie raised her rifle, advancing as the girl ran outside. She followed the blood on the floor, moving quickly but quietly in rubber-soled boots, watching the flanks. There was a streak of fresh blood on the service desk counter where Tanya had climbed over, scattered packs of cigarettes on the floor beneath it. A dead girl in a brown smock with a name tag reading BILLY was on the other side, groaning and reaching across.
Angie shot her in the head and went back outside.
The lawyer’s shotgun fired, and the insurance adjuster slammed the back hatch of the Excursion, calling out, “We’re loaded.” Margaret was already in one of the rear seats with Tanya, trying to calm the screaming girl and stop the bleeding. Hundreds of the dead pressed in across the parking lot, the kindergartener near the front.
Angie looked at the little girl for a long moment. “Drive,” she ordered, and Mark went to the wheel. “Elson, we’re leaving.” The lawyer fired another shot, missing his target completely, and piled into the back. Angie rode shotgun.
In the third-row seat, Tanya was sobbing and wailing, “She bit me!”
The rest of them rode in silence as rain clouds rolled in from the bay.
• • •
Bud Franks was looking for Maxie. He didn’t need him for anything in particular, but he wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. Normally he would have gone straight to the roof, where the man would be stretched out in a lawn chair smoking like a fiend. He was the only one in their group with the habit and had been politely but firmly told he could not smoke inside. He wouldn’t be up there now, though. Maxie had run out of cigarettes two days ago and had been sullen and short-tempered ever since.
He wasn’t in the kitchen. The man refused to do much of anything around the firehouse, but he had appointed himself cook, and it turned out he had some skill in that area. Perhaps, Bud thought, that had been his trade before the plague, but in the weeks since his arrival, and even with direct questions, the man had revealed nothing about himself. Margaret and Denny weren’t of any help, either. They had been moving along a sidewalk together and nearly knocked the man down as he came out of a liquor store with his pistol in hand. Maxie had looked them over as if deciding whether to shoot them or ignore them, then sighed and gestured at his Cadillac parked at the curb. “Get on in,” he said. Tanya was already in the passenger seat. That was only fifteen minutes before they showed up at the firehouse. When asked about the older man, Tanya shrugged and said nothing. The total lack of information bothered the cop in Bud. And then there was Maxie’s refusal to do any work outside the kitchen. He wouldn’t even wash dishes or clean his own pots and utensils.
Tanya had taken to him, even though he appeared to be just shy of being old enough to be her grandfather. She cleaned up after him in the kitchen, did his laundry, even made his bed. The rest of their relationship was none of Bud’s business.
The one accommodation Maxie made outside cooking was to stand watch, but only at night and only up on the roof, where he could smoke. He didn’t ask for a rifle or shotgun, and for reasons the ex-deputy couldn’t explain, that made him feel a little better. Bad enough the man carried that .32 revolver in his waistband every place he went. Maxie hadn’t said anything to indicate it, didn’t have the tats or the yard walk, but he felt like an ex-con to Bud.
While he looked for their mysterious cook, Bud checked the perimeter, finding it secure. They ran the generator sporadically, usually to charge the two-way radios Bud and Angie carried, and to power up the firehouse’s communication system once a day. Cooking was done with a propane stove, and Coleman lanterns provided light at night. They had covered all the windows with blankets to minimize the chance that a corpse walking by might notice movement inside during the day, or the glow of lanterns after dark. The same had been done with the glass front door, and a fat, six-foot-tall air compressor had been muscled out of the garage bay and shoved against it, then locked in place with canvas straps. If they broke through the glass, it would slow them down a little. The windows in the garage roll-up doors had been painted black except for small peepholes. There wasn’t enough paint to do the rest of the windows, but it was on their shopping list.
Getting the dead away from the firehouse was Angie’s job. She had retrieved a silencer from the van, fitted it to a Canadian assault rifle, and then gone to the roof, leaning over and clearing them out one at a time, front and back. The bodies were collected and hauled out to the rear parking lot over several days, and only when nothing was around that might see them. Now the only thing that would attract attention was when one of the vehicles rolled in or out, and that was done only after careful watching from the rooftop. Invariably a few would show up anyway and would have to be cleaned up with the silenced rifle.
Thank goodness for the van, he thought. Without the lethal protection of its contents, they wouldn’t have survived. Additional thanks were due to the fact that Angie and Bud had happened to be out filming when it all went bad and had the van with them. They could just as easily have been in L.A. at a preproduction or script meeting, unarmed and defenseless.
Bud checked the main room, where Sophia was sitting on the floor with a circle of kids.
“Hi, Bud.” Being around the kids obviously made her happy, and it seemed that taking care of them took her mind off whatever horrors she had seen before reaching the firehouse. They kept her too busy to dwell on whomever she had lost. Sophia didn’t share those details, though she surely had her personal tragedies, like the rest of them, and no one pressed her about it.
“How’s our new arrival?” Bud asked.
Denny, who had come in with Maxie’s group, was eight but didn’t seem to mind playing with the smaller kids. Next to him was a ten-year-old Angie had collected during a supply raid (Bud couldn’t remember his name), and then there were the two little sisters Maxie rescued from the parking lot by letting them come in with Sophia. Each held a doll, the girls providing voices as the toys engaged in a discussion about hair and clothes. Sophia looked at a three-year-old with blond hair sitting in the circle and playing with a yellow plastic truck. He made an “rrrrrr” sound as he drove i
t around his knees and feet. “Ben’s doing just fine.” She rubbed his back. “I think he’s forgotten about what happened.”
“Has he said anything about his family?”
She shook her head. “I still can’t believe he’s alive.”
Neither could Bud. One of their rooftop lookouts had spotted the boy walking down the center of the road outside, carrying a stuffed rabbit with blood on it, whimpering. The noise he was making, his mere presence, was drawing the dead from all angles. The lookout called downstairs to Angie, who was on the second floor. She looked out a window, and then a moment later came pounding down the stairs with a .45 in a shoulder holster, racking a shell into a combat twelve-gauge.
She made an animal noise as she bolted out the back door, teeth bared.
The others crowded to the windows and watched as Angie sprinted around the firehouse and straight at the child, sliding to a stop nearly on top of him, pushing him to the ground and then planting a foot on either side of him. The boy curled into a ball and covered his ears as Angie began blasting with the shotgun, turning in a tight circle. When it was empty, she cast it aside and pulled the .45, assumed a shooting stance and went to work, squeezing off steady, measured rounds, still rotating through the points of the clock. When the .45 was dry, she ejected the magazine and inserted a new one in a motion so fast and fluid that the firing didn’t seem to stop.
When Bud reached her in the street, she was already on the way back, the boy in her arms as she soothed him. Twenty corpses lay crumpled in a circle behind her, all with head wounds.
“He doesn’t know his mommy or daddy’s name, or at least he can’t remember right now. He hasn’t said anything about what happened to them. He’s eating okay and he gets along well with the other kids,” Sophia said, smoothing his hair. Ben tilted his head into the touches. “He has nightmares, though.”
Bud looked at the boy, then at Sophia. “I’m glad you’re here with us.”
She smiled. “Me too.”
Bud went to the garage bays. Angie insisted on leading the raids and wouldn’t even discuss Bud going in her place, despite his repeated offers. She was good at it, always bringing back plenty of food and vital supplies like camping equipment, fuel, clothing, first-aid supplies, and batteries, as well as toys for the kids and the occasional paperback or board game to keep the adults occupied. Bud couldn’t claim he would do better, and although it still didn’t feel right, he was mature enough to admit that it was misplaced, masculine pride talking. She was younger, faster, more fit, and without question a better marksman. It was the right decision.
The bays currently held three vehicles, with space for the Excursion, which was currently out. The Angie’s Armory van faced toward the front, next to the empty slot. Facing the rear roll-ups was an extended white passenger van with six rows of seats and Bayside Senior Care on the side in blue letters. Parked next to it was Maxie’s Cadillac.
Maxie was in here, the smell of cigarette smoke strong. The man was sitting on the rear bumper of Bud and Angie’s van, legs stretched out, puffing away.
“I thought you were out,” Bud said.
“I am,” Maxie replied. “Found a stale one in my glove box, though. Lucky for me.”
“You’re supposed to smoke on the roof.”
Maxie ignored him and slapped a hand against one of the van’s rear doors. “Why you keep this rig locked, Mr. Bud?”
Bud walked to him slowly and folded his arms. “How do you know it’s locked?”
Maxie smiled with the cigarette clamped between his teeth, flashing a bit of gold. “You afraid someone’s gonna steal your guns?”
“It’s safer for everyone this way. There’s kids around.”
The man seemed to consider that for a moment. “Don’t want all that firepower falling into the wrong hands, do we?” He crushed the butt out on the cement.
“That’s absolutely right, Maxie.”
The man flashed a gold-capped grin and stood. “Smart thinking.”
For one crazy moment Bud knew the older man was going to pull the .32 out of his waistband and shoot him right in the chest. Instead he started toward the firehouse door, just as the Excursion’s engine rumbled up into the driveway out front. “Mama’s home.”
“We’ll need help unloading,” said Bud.
“I’ll send someone out.” Maxie went inside.
• • •
Tanya didn’t have much longer and they knew it. She was lying on a bunk upstairs, her arm tightly bandaged, beads of sweat standing out on her face. Her eyelids fluttered and she groaned, rolling her head back and forth, trying to find a cool spot on the pillow. Margaret Chu sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her face with a wet washcloth, trying to keep her comfortable, while Sophia—wearing heavy rubber gloves and a clear plastic face shield—cleaned vomit off the floor, putting the rags in a red bio bucket.
“You can’t tell me who to see, Nana!” Tanya’s words were slurred. “I love him!”
Margaret pressed the wet cloth to the girl’s forehead and hushed her, but Tanya was beyond noticing.
“Maybe this will pass,” said Larraine, the old woman whose husband had MS. She stood behind Margaret, her lined face revealing that she didn’t believe her own statement.
Angie looked sideways at her uncle. The communication equipment in the small room up front had delivered only static for days straight. Then one afternoon there was a brief transmission, a few garbled sentences where the only words they could make out were national, evacuation centers, and compromised. It wasn’t encouraging. Later that day another message came through, this one as clear as if the speaker were in the same room, a recorded Emergency Broadcast System announcement. It repeated for nearly an hour before the static took over once more, and there had been nothing since.
The message said the plague was viral, a highly contagious blood-borne pathogen transferred through a human bite. Animals appeared to be immune. The symptoms resembled flu with periods of dementia and ended in death one hundred percent of the time. The infected were to be isolated in a secure quarantine. Late-stage victims became ambulatory after death and were extremely aggressive. There was no mention of the term slow burn or its effect, and the word zombie was notably absent.
Tanya was eleven hours past her bite.
Angie and Bud stepped into the hallway and spoke quietly. They could hear rain drumming on the roof. “We know where this is going,” her uncle said.
Angie glanced back inside, where the other women were trying to keep Tanya calm and cool as the fever burned her up. “So what do we do with her? Keep her in there?” she asked. They both knew that wasn’t an option. She would turn, and then one of the things they were working so hard to keep outside would be inside.
“The radio said isolation.”
“Where? We can’t lock her in a closet.”
“I was thinking about the parking lot,” Bud said.
“Leave her delirious on the hood of a car? She’ll be eaten in minutes.”
“No, inside one of the cars.”
Angie thought about it. That would be better than the roof, which she had been about to suggest. Besides, if they put her up there they would have to deal with her eventually.
Maxie scuffed up the nearby staircase and stopped, looking past them. “How’s my girl doing?”
“She’s dying,” said Angie.
“And nothin’ gonna stop that,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. He went inside, and Angie and her uncle watched him rest a hand on the shoulder of each lady, taking the washcloth from Margaret and sitting down on the edge of the bed. He moved the cloth gently over Tanya’s face and began to sing softly to her, something from Motown. The girl’s restlessness subsided, and the women left the room, slipping between Bud and Angie and heading downstairs.
“In a car, on the street, chained in the garage bay, none of it changes what’s going to happen,” Bud said, running a hand through his bristly hair. “She’s a danger to us, Ang.”
Angie put her hand on Bud’s arm. “What if we—”
A gunshot made them both jump. Maxie stood over the bed, lowering the small pistol. He had wrapped the girl’s head in a towel to cut down on the mess. Angie and Bud could only stare at him as he squatted and began rummaging through Tanya’s messenger bag, pulling out several packs of Salems and slipping them into his pockets. He tested the gun barrel to see if it was cool enough, then shoved it back in his waistband.
Maxie popped a cigarette into his mouth as he eased between them. “I’ll be on the roof. Supper’s at six.”
TWENTY
San Francisco
Getting out was proving to be a slow, dangerous process, and Xavier had begun to doubt whether it could be done at all. The dead multiplied with each passing day as they rooted out survivors, and now they infested not only the streets but buildings as well. The once-vibrant city was a graveyard of shattered lives, a wasteland ruled by the dead. They didn’t need to sleep or pause to rest, didn’t get sidetracked searching for clean water or shelter, weren’t forced to wait when one of their number just couldn’t go on anymore. They had no need to hide, for they were the predators, relentlessly moving and hunting day and night.
The group had not seen either law enforcement or a military presence, none of the hoped-for signs of an organized evacuation. There were no more helicopters overhead, and they had only once heard a jet go by, but that was days ago. As for other survivors, there had been only a couple, as fleeting as shadows darting across streets and into doorways. The few who spotted them ran away at once.
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