by Ben Tripp
Even so, Danny’s companion was the eye-catching one.
It was understood among their fellow travelers that nobody was to ask about her, although Danny knew they talked about her when she wasn’t around. Underneath a stained, shapeless muumuu with big flowers on it, the woman was bound from head to foot in dirty bandages, like a cartoon mummy. She was known simply as “the Leper,” and she was untouchable in every sense of the word. Her presence was part of the price of being a member of the Tribe.
“Water,” Danny repeated, not much interested in the man’s feelings.
“I don’t want it,” the Leper said.
“You need it. Your condition’s getting worse.”
“So is yours.”
Danny glanced at the mirror again. The prisoner was looking at her now. If he hadn’t figured out what the Leper’s condition was, he soon would. But he seemed like a bright guy. And scared to death.
As if thinking the same thing, the Leper turned her head to face him. The bones in her neck creaked audibly. Mike could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. She took a breath, speaking through the exhalation.
“We all make mistakes,” she said. “It’s only human.”
3
The radio opened up, grainy with static. It was a call from the White Whale, the immense motor home that formed the center of the Tribe’s convoy. The voice on the radio was not Maria, but Patrick, another of Danny’s original fellow-survivors from the desperate hours after the undead first rose up in another life.
“The kid’s all right,” Patrick said. “Nobody’s hurt. Maria’s got a shiner, that’s it. Where have you been?”
“Got the perp. Over.”
“We were calling you for the last half hour. Just so you don’t feel like you need to lecture us about communication when you get back,” Patrick said.
“It did cross my mind,” Danny said. “Remember to say ‘over’ when you’re done speaking. Over.”
“Can’t we pretend this is just a phone call? I really miss phone calls.”
So the child was okay. The failed kidnapper had that in his favor. Danny hated to admit it—she hated to admit anything—but she didn’t have a clear answer as to what should be done with this guy. She would have to put it to a Tribe vote or something. For now, she was silent with her thoughts.
They drove on through a broken country.
It was a year and a half since the onslaught of the undead plague: Lawns had become fields, pavement was buckling and sprouting with grass and sapling trees, and everywhere there were vast swaths of scorched earth and burned-out towns where fires had raged unopposed. Cities were unapproachable, swarming with animated corpses.
In contrast to the ruined places, the Tribe would sometimes pass through deserted neighborhoods that appeared not to have suffered at all—overlook the untrimmed yards, and the houses were just as firm as the day they were built. The windows cast back reflections of the clouds, the roofs shed the weather, and the walls stood straight and clean. But here and there a front door hung open in a litter of leaves, or there was a rotten shape in the grass with one skeletal arm outflung.
The Tribe had been traversing the western states, mostly, looking for supplies and safety. Neither one lasted very long. But they had seen a great deal of the changed America along the way. Of all the ruined things they saw, it was the cars that bothered Danny the most. She’d spent a long time fighting wars overseas, and had seen ruins and fire and death. But in those foreign places, everybody took the bus or drove shabby little cars and dust-colored pickup trucks. Here, though? This was America. The cars were supposed to be bright and clean and shiny, neatly parked along streets and in driveways. To Danny, who had once owned and loved a flawless vintage cherry red Mustang, cars were a projection of who Americans were.
Now these once-prized machines were scattered all over the countryside like discarded toys, many of them smashed and broken, doors sagging open. The vehicles had become colorful tombstones marking the death of an entire civilization. And many of them sheltered the undead. It might have been some dim reptile memory of their past lives that drew the zeroes to wait there in the vehicles, dormant, their eyes and noses hung with webs of mucus. Many of them had ceased to function and were now mummified in the driver’s seats, truly dead. But others were simply biding their time, waiting like trap-door spiders for prey to come along. The dead sat in the cars and waited, and rotted, their sleepless graves made of steel.
4
No one but the scouts would have seen the child. The scouts had spent the last year looking for anything with two legs, anywhere they found it. Their eyes had become specialized, like big game hunters, like fighter pilots. They saw things differently. They saw man-shapes, no matter how well concealed.
The boy was around two hundred meters from the road, probably with a concealed bolt-hole nearby so he didn’t feel he had to run to escape. Topper saw him first, and shouted to his wingmen, Ernie and Conn, over the crackle of their big Harleys: “Stander, three o’clock!”
They had a system. The spotter would stop to destroy the thing if it was a zero, or make contact if it was human; the others would continue on. Commonsense precautions: no leaving the paved surface in pursuit, radio circuits to be left open. If there was a problem, the other two scouts would double back and assist. Otherwise they were backing up the primary mission—seeking safety and supplies.
Ernie and Conn kept on going. Topper swung his bike around and let the engine idle, his boots on the asphalt. It was a big, windswept nowhere, this place. There was a railway line off in the distance with a train sitting on the tracks. Just the cars, no engine, like a giant decapitated snake. Topper watched the child, and the child watched back.
Topper had personally hand-dropped hundreds of zeroes since the crisis began. He had shot them, speared them, set them on fire, hacked them to pieces with axes, machetes, shovels, and meat cleavers. He’d run them over, blown them up, and bludgeoned them into ground hamburger with anything he could lift over his head. And yet dropping the kids still bothered him. Like braining Casper the fucking man-eating Ghost, as he’d explained it to Ernie. The things had been children once, and the tragedy of it lingered. They’d never grow any taller, get zits, or fall in love. They would just drift around the countryside like toy scarecrows until they found fresh meat or rotted off their feet. Children forever, and yet never again. Topper hated them.
Usually the living shouted something right away when a scout stopped to check them out; they called for help or news or offered what they had to trade, if they had anything. This kid didn’t say a word. He had the dirty pallor of a zero, too, like sheet metal left out in the weather, and his clothes were falling off in blackened strips. Topper drew the rifle out of his saddlebag, scraped a couple of dead bugs off the barrel, and worked the action to get a round into the chamber.
The kid just stood there. Had to be a zero.
Topper sighted down the hunting scope on the rifle. It was a very nice piece of optics on a fine weapon—if you were a survivor, you could have the best of anything. The entire nation had become one vast half-ruined superstore with no employees to watch the stock. He trailed the scope along the grass and found the kid. The face jumped into view, big and clear. That always startled him. He checked the eyes, but they looked empty, like those of all zeroes. Then he saw the dog.
Holy shit, the damn kid had a dog. Some kind of little Buster Brown mutant dog with its face smashed in and no tail. Black and white with big spots. Frozen eels wriggled down Topper’s spine. Jesus, was this a zombie dog? Had the disease crossed the species line? There was talk of that, some places they’d been. If it spread to animals, that would be the end of the remnants of mankind, game over, people knew that much. He let the scope fall on the dog, his finger leaning on the trigger.
But it was clearly an ordinary dog. The ugliest one he’d seen in quite some time, but still. It was shivering and turning circles around the kid’s feet. Topper sighted on the kid again: Th
e child bent down and put his hand on the dog’s fist-sized head. There wasn’t a zero in the world would do that. Topper let out a short breath of relief. It was a living kid after all. The only problem was, that meant Topper was probably idling his bike at the edge of a trap set by the boy’s people—men with guns hidden in the ditch, explosive booby traps, cutthroat wires stretched across the road, a tiger pit concealed in the ground somewhere in front of the child. He’d seen it all. A working vehicle, a little gas, or a bottle of aspirin—your life was worth whatever desperate survivors could take off your corpse. The zeroes were killers, but men were still murderers.
Topper waited, feeling eyes crawling over him from behind every stalk of wheat. You could hide an army in that yellow grass. But he didn’t get the sense anybody else was actually there. No sign of trampling, no broken stems or footpaths cut through the fields. Still, he wasn’t going to leave the road. Rule numero uno: Never leave the road alone. There could be fifty people hidden on that broken-down train, for example, and then bye-bye Topper.
He rested his rifle on the gas tank and switched off the engine. The sound of the other scooters was long-gone, so his voice sounded like the bang of hammers when he called out to the boy: “Hey. Hey! Come on over here.”
Predictably, the boy didn’t move. He’d have to be a goddamn fool to do it. Topper wasn’t a confidence-inspiring figure, even without the rifle in his hands. He was a big man clad in scuffed black leather, with a coarse, wind-scorched face surmounted by a forked black beard. In a land without laws, he still looked like an outlaw. Don’t fuck with the Topper.
He thought about the situation. They didn’t come across stray kids anymore. In the early days, there had been many, but then the zeroes got most of them, and the rest generally starved or met with accidents—or human marauders. It didn’t seem possible that this one could have survived alone all this time.
“Kid, you hungry?!” Topper shouted.
The boy didn’t say anything, but Topper could see the dog capering around out there, and he had an idea. “Dinner,” he tried. “Uh, num-nums. Supper. Lunch. Breakfast. Food.” The dog didn’t react, but the boy’s head tilted on its side in a doglike manner. So he could hear, at least.
“Come and get it,” Topper tried, and that did the trick. Every dog had a dinner call. It took off like an arrow from a bow, charging straight for Topper through the grass and looking like a skinny soccer ball with those spots. Then the animal burst out of the grass, leaped the ditch, and was springing up and down on its hind legs beside Topper like a pogo stick, whining and chirping.
“Okay, okay, calm down, boy,” Topper said, and fished a scrap of venison jerky out of his handlebar bag. He tossed it to the dog. “Jesus Christ, you look like a goblin’s asshole,” he observed.
The dog ran off a few feet and started tearing the meat to bits. Topper kept one eye on the boy during this operation, and was gratified to see the dog’s changing sides had gotten the boy to react; he was trotting toward the road, obviously afraid for the dog’s safety. Topper threw another piece of jerky on the pavement and gnawed one himself as the boy slowed down, caution setting in. Now the kid was at the edge of the tall grass. There was shorter stuff along the road, no concealment there. The boy’s eyes cut between Topper and the dog, who was valiantly wolfing down enormous chunks of the jerky, gagging on half of them.
“Listen kid, I ain’t gonna hurt you or your dog,” Topper said. “You saw them other guys? We got a convoy of vehicles, couple hundred folks down back the road about ten miles. We’re known as ‘the Tribe.’ I’m a scout. This is what we do. We find living people and zeroes ahead of the convoy. Look for traps and trouble. So I ain’t got any designs on you, boy, but if this here is a trap meant for me, understand I’m gonna shoot you first and your confederates after. Are we clear?”
Topper said the last part loudly, casting his voice around to the sighing grass. If some slingshot-wielding relative was lying in wait, he might think twice now. Or maybe the kid was nothing more than bait, his survival of little interest. That was the gamble.
“So, you hungry? You look skinnier than a Jap’s pecker.”
The boy thought about that, watching the dog eat, and at length he nodded gravely. Topper produced a good-sized chunk of jerky and threw it knife-style in the general direction of the boy. The wind caught it, and the boy had to scamper along after it, climbing down into the ditch. Topper was patient. Results were happening. He observed as the boy ripped the jerky apart and hardly chewed it, swallowing big splintery pieces of meat dry. The pup was now licking the road with an immense pink tongue. Topper threw another chunk of jerky to the dog. Then he ate another one himself. It was good quality, no seasoning except salt, but the meat had a fresh game flavor. He’d bartered half a case of bug spray for the stuff at a fortified settlement ten days ago.
“My buddies should be coming back in a little while, unless they get killed. So you can think on it until then, and if you want to go tell your people about us, I’ll parlay with ’em, maybe we can do some business. Maybe they can tag along with us. That’s the deal. I ain’t got more than that to tell you.”
The boy was staring at the bag with the jerky in it. Topper thought the kid might come all the way over to him now, with the taste of food still in his mouth. But he wasn’t going to grab the boy and throw him across the back of the bike. This was not a hostage situation. He’d have to wait for Danny to decide what to do, tedious as that could get.
Then something occurred to Topper.
“You do got people, right?”
The boy shook his head.
“You ain’t got people? You can’t be alone. I don’t mean relations or whatnot. I mean . . . the others. Who’s with you?”
The boy shook his head again. Not the talkative type.
“Nobody at all? You survived all this time without nobody?”
The boy extended his arm and pointed up the road with a dirt-black finger, the direction the other scouts had gone. Topper squinted at him.
“This ain’t fuckin’ charades, kid. Just tell me.”
The kid dangled two of his fingers and wiggled them. Legs, he meant. Walking. Now he did it with all of his fingers: several people walking. Then he made two fingers and flung them over his shoulder. He did this several times, and then finished the performance with one pair of fingers walking through the air.
Then he pointed at himself and the dog.
Topper scratched his chin through his beard. “Okay, you saying there was a bunch of you and now there’s only you and that dog there?”
The boy nodded again, almost a bow.
“What’s that way?” Topper indicated the direction the boy had pointed.
The boy bared his teeth and went into a crouch, limbs jutting, fingers hooked into claws—and for a second Topper was looking at a hunter, one of the quick zeroes that could chase down prey in packs, like wolves. It scared him a little, as if the boy had thrown off a human mask to reveal the mummified cannibal beneath. But the boy had made his point, and just as quickly, he stood upright again and the monster was gone.
“Son of a bitch,” Topper muttered, and got on the radio.
5
The Tribe’s convoy, some fifty vehicles and two hundred souls, was parked along the roadside between a burned-out city to the west and an area that Danny had heard from fellow travelers was crawling with zeroes. That’s where the scouts had gone. There were two ways to survive in the world: find yourself a fortress somewhere and defend it against man and zero, foraging ever farther afield for supplies, or stay perpetually on the move. The Tribe followed the latter approach. But it meant a lot more scouting. And waiting around.
Danny was the Tribe’s leader, the closest thing to an authority figure among them. The informal hierarchy was pretty simple: Danny at the top, then the scouts, then all the specialists—Dr. Amy, the cooks, Maria the radio operator, the auto mechanics, gunsmiths, and so on—and after them the “chooks,” or civilians, people withou
t any particular skill who did grunt work, built fires, carried water, and stood sentry.
These days, a lot of the Tribe’s people were just sick of traveling. It came up almost daily: They envied the folk who stayed put in fortified places and only had to risk their necks on foraging expeditions. But Danny sure as hell wasn’t going to hole up somewhere and get surrounded. A number of dictators had learned that the hard way even before the crisis. The zeroes had a kind of homing instinct. They would gather from miles around, once they found a stationary group of the living. Drawn to the feast by some unknown telepathy. She was certain they communicated over long distances somehow. Black magic or pheromones, it didn’t matter.
The people who agreed with Danny’s assessment didn’t like to stop moving for more than a day or two, no matter how secure the location. If they did have to stop, they liked to be somewhere with a clear escape route and high walls. Currently, they were halted in a shitty, indefensible nowhere, the only virtue of which was the surrounding grasslands. They could see for two miles in every direction. But the water was running low, the shallow trench latrine was starting to stink, and it was time to go.
There was an argument to this effect in progress when Danny pulled the interceptor up alongside the White Whale. Raised voices dropped low when she opened her door, and fell silent as she approached. She had that effect on people.
“What’s the trouble now?” Danny asked, not wanting to know.
