by Ben Tripp
“Winter’s almost here, I guess,” Topper said, and took a couple of burning swallows of liquor. He let out his breath in a hoo as if he’d just eaten something spicy.
“Water?” Danny offered him her canteen. Topper wasn’t sure if the Leper drank from it or not, so he declined it, and took another blazing pull of bourbon.
“Hood’s still warm,” Danny added, after they’d been silent a while. “Sit over here and keep your ass from freezing.”
They sat on the hood of the Mustang with their feet propped up on the zero-catcher wire across the fender. Danny leaned back on the windshield and looked at the night sky; Topper rested his elbows on his knees and watched the distant campfires scattered around the truck stop plaza. He could see the outline of Wulf Gunnar atop the White Whale, a hunched shape with the barrel of a rifle sticking out of it. The old man spent most of his time up there. Somebody else must be guarding the prisoner.
Topper found himself wondering if he and Danny were friends. They were more like buddies in a military unit than friends, precisely. They’d each been in the Marines, if years apart, so maybe there wasn’t much difference. Topper’s tour happened before women had combat roles. He and Danny had gone through some heavy bonding experiences after everything went to hell. Their first meeting, she had damn near shot him for murder; since then she was usually mad at him for something or other, but she relied on him a lot, too. Topper kept the scouts organized and stepped in when there was trouble among the chooks. Now it seemed almost like she was reaching out to him, trying to be nice or something. Or maybe it was nothing more than she didn’t want to drink alone.
They were silent except for the occasional hard swallow to get the raw spirits down. Danny could drink like nobody else Topper knew, excepting Wolfman Gunnar. But she was just passing the time on this occasion. She wasn’t drinking for effect, as far as he could tell.
“So,” Topper began, and said nothing more.
“I got too much on my mind,” Danny said, once it became clear Topper was done speaking. “You guys deal with the Chevelle however you want. Keep him away from the convoy. I’m more worried about how we’re going to get around those zeroes up ahead.”
“It’s bad,” Topper said. “Where we turned around they were horizon to horizon out ahead, thousands of them. Like fuckin’ two-leg cockroaches.”
“They didn’t follow you, right?”
“We’d be knee-deep in ’em right now if that was the case.”
Danny spat in the grass. “There’s something on the other side of that swarm. That guy I captured, Mike? I don’t think he’s bullshitting about doing the kid a favor when he tried to grab him. He says it’s the real deal. Safe place for children, out east of here. The Dakotas, somewhere. We keep hearing about that from different sources on the road. I’d like to find it. See if it’s true. That’s why we have to punch through here.”
“This would be a shitload easier if we had a phone. I miss having a fuckin’ phone,” Topper muttered, and drank deeply.
“I miss McDonald’s,” Danny said.
“I don’t,” Topper said, taking the canteen because his esophagus was on fire. “All it did was make me fart. And my sweat smelled like mayonnaise.” It also made him fat and impotent, but he didn’t particularly want to get into those details.
“What the hell does mayonnaise smell like?”
He considered it. “I honestly can’t remember.”
“We’ll never have mayonnaise again. Think about that.”
“There’s about a hundred million unopened jars of it out there. Go nuts.”
Danny coughed out her rough laugh. “Are you kidding? Eat mayonnaise after the sell-by date? That’s dangerous.”
They were silent for a minute. Topper couldn’t relax around the sheriff. He felt like moving on. She was still lying back on the windshield when he stood up, like a cheerleader waiting for the quarterback, except not. She was looking at the firelight through her bottle. It cast a rippling amber glow on her face.
“I miss beer,” she said, sadly.
“Oh, fuck yeah.” Topper missed beer so much he even dreamed about it. He looked around at the gigantic darkness beyond the truck stop. “You sure you should be out this far from the convoy? Zeroes could come through that tall grass pretty sudden. It’s dark as hell. Even with your sister around, seems like a risk to me.”
He knew right away it was a mistake to mention it.
“Don’t you worry about us,” Danny said, after a silence. “She’s keeping all our asses safe. Don’t forget that.”
Topper knew it was time to get out before the anger built up, so he held the remainder of his bottle out to Danny.
“Keep it,” she said, and he did, and walked back toward the scouts’ fire to pass it around.
Kelley came back, her bound feet swishing in the grass. She must have been waiting for Topper to move on.
“Catch anything?” Danny asked.
Her sister’s slack lungs hissed in a long breath. “No,” Kelley said. “I saw a jackrabbit, but they’re too fast.”
She stood beside Danny, looking at the fires and the silhouettes of the Tribespeople. Danny assumed the conversation was over. But after a couple of minutes, Kelley spoke again, using the same breath.
“I smell hunters.”
“There’s a shitload of dead ones over there.”
“The ones I smell are not dead. They are like me.”
“Which direction?” Danny slid to her feet and popped the latch on her holster, placing the bottle on the hood of the interceptor.
“It’s faint, but everywhere. In the same way this convoy smells like living blood.”
“Is there a threat? I mean, are we in immediate danger?” She opened the driver’s side door and reached inside. If she lit up the roof lights, the entire Tribe would go to battle stations.
“You’re always in danger,” Kelley said. “You remember before, I talked to one of my kind? There’s another one around somewhere. I can smell it. Almost like when you feel a car coming before you hear it. Just the smallest hint.”
“A thinker? The fuck didn’t you tell me this before?” Danny had her fingers on the switch box. She might throw some siren in for good measure. Her heart was starting to race.
“I could not say before, until I crawled on the ground and smelled the grass,” Kelley said. “That’s what I was just doing when I saw the rabbit. I tasted the dirt. The smells are hidden.”
The living Kelley would never have tasted dirt.
“Fuck,” Danny said. “Fuck. Okay, you told me, that’s the main thing. Party time.”
Better to raise the alarm and be wrong than take a chance. She rocked the switches and the lights came on, blue, red, and white throbbing over the dark perimeter. Voices went up around the encampment. About two seconds later, headlights glared on in the middle distance beyond the interstate, an engine revved, and the mysterious Chevelle came roaring down the road past the truck stop.
Gunfire erupted from the passenger window. Bullets whined off the pavement and hissed through the air. There were shouts of fear—shots and police lights so close together instantly plunged the camp into confusion. A scrap of light revealed a male profile behind the wheel.
Seconds later, Danny’s interceptor was howling after the Chevelle in a spray of dust and flying gravel, siren screaming. Topper saw the sheriff’s silhouette at the wheel, outlined by firelight for a moment, her face constricted in a snarl, the thin scarecrow of her sister in the seat beside her. The bottle was still rolling around on the hood of the car. As she reached the roadway it was flung clear, and shattered on the yellow line. Then they were gone in a red streak of taillights.
Topper ran for his bike. In under a minute, the scouts were on the chase. It was time to find out who was at the wheel of that Chevelle.
8
For several miles Danny fought to close the gap. The Chevelle was one of the muscle classics from before computers ran the engines. It must have been
bored out and supercharged, because the interceptor couldn’t gain on it, although it had a technical power advantage. And the driver was nerveless, precise, making superb use of the road. He turned his headlights off for long stretches to make himself invisible, but couldn’t lose his pursuers because his brake lights still worked. That was all Danny knew about the driver, except he might have a confederate to do the shooting. But he might not. He hadn’t been aiming for effective fire.
Danny, however, planned to make her next shot count. There were sabot rounds in her tactical shotgun that would punch right through the Chevelle from end to end, if she could get a clean bead on it: Sabots were sharp steel projectiles with fall-away boots around them to increase velocity and accuracy—like a two-stage rocket out of a gun. A gift from a SWAT locker in Nebraska. Right now she was mostly struggling to keep the interceptor on the road. The pavement was in rough shape, and at 95 MPH the steering wheel needed two complete hands, not the seven digits she was working with. She realized the unknown driver must have been waiting all along, concealed near the truck stop, knowing they would come that way. This was all part of a plan, and it might be a diversion.
“Smokey to scouts, go back and seal up the defenses,” Danny barked into her radio handset. “I think this is a decoy, over.”
There was a broken reply; she couldn’t understand it. The damn radios were still clouded with choppy static. The scouts continued to follow after her on their motorcycles, so they hadn’t gotten the message. Maybe they all ought to turn around, but Danny wanted to know the driver’s motive. Then she wanted to crucify him on the roof of his own machine. It would be a public service message to others who came along, in case they thought her clemency toward Mike was some kind of standard behavior: Hi, I’m Danny Adelman. Do not fuck with the Tribe.
“If they’re trying to lure you away,” Kelley said, “it’s working.”
“No shit,” Danny said, gripping the wheel like it was a venomous snake. “You worried about it?” Danny took her eyes off the road to look at the bandaged face, as if there was anything there to be learned.
“I’m already dead. Nothing to worry about.”
• • •
The Chevelle’s taillights were out of view between a couple of small, knobby hills. Danny thought she could make the curve between them faster than the Chevelle had, maybe get within firing range. Then she saw dust spiraling up in her headlights, and her foot went to the brake pedal. She battled to keep herself from flying off the road. The Chevelle must have left the pavement.
She lost some traction as the interceptor decelerated, slewing over the tar, and then she turned the wheel over so the nose of the vehicle was pointed up a dirt track that cut in a straight line far out into the rolling grass, well beyond the range of the lamps. A tail of dust boiled through the light, the Chevelle racing away down the track. Danny didn’t punch the gas again. She waited.
The bike scouts rumbled up and put a leg down beside the interceptor.
“You have any idea what they’re up to?” Topper called out, once Danny had her window down.
“Feels like a decoying action. You guys go back. I’ll check this out.”
“Alone?”
“I’m not alone,” Danny replied. Topper threw a glance at Kelley, but didn’t say anything. Yeah, right, the look meant. Danny was slow-burning now, but Topper waited.
“If you’re volunteering, get in,” she said. “The rest of you get the fuck going. Fast.”
Topper pulled his bike off the road and laid it down out of view, then climbed into the cramped rear seat of the interceptor. Danny switched off the light bar on the roof, doused the headlights, and eased down the farm road into the darkness. The rest of the scouts passed a look around between them, but the sheriff had spoken. They turned their cycles in a half-circle and hightailed it back toward the truck stop.
• • •
The moon was thin and low, but starlight meant they could see shapes in the darkness. Danny pulled the interceptor off the track and she and Topper got out.
Kelley followed them. Danny raised a hand.
“Stay here. He’ll back me up.”
Kelley filled her empty lungs in order to speak. “I smell blood,” she said.
Topper shifted on his feet. He was nervous, maybe thinking Kelley meant his blood.
“This is a fight for the living,” Danny said. “If you catch a bullet or something, you won’t heal. We’ll be back in an hour or so. Just wait. Listen to the radio and honk the horn if anything changes back at the camp.”
Kelley didn’t respond. She’d told them what she knew. She was done.
Danny retrieved a cold-weather jacket from the trunk—it was midnight blue, and would hide her better in the dark than the tan windbreaker she was wearing. Besides, Topper was right: Winter had arrived.
They moved a little way off the shoulder so they weren’t in a clear field of fire down the road, then hiked along parallel to it. There was a lot of tripping and cursing in the blackness, and twice they came up against wire fences that were invisible until they hit them.
They both carried shotguns and combat knives; Danny also had her sidearm and a hand grenade tucked away in her utility belt. The scouts had found caches of combat-grade hardware at abandoned military bases and at police stations, and there was a general rule that grenades, rocket launchers, and the like were not possessed by anyone except a few security personnel in the Tribe. It kept accidents and arguments from getting out of hand. In the trunk of the interceptor, Danny kept a black nylon backpack containing enough ordnance to sink a destroyer.
She and Topper stole through the night, getting quieter and more careful as they began to see more man-signs: trash caught in the fences, junked vehicles, wheel ruts going off to various unseen destinations.
Now they were crouching, breathing carefully, hands on their weapons.
Anybody who dared to keep a homestead these days put out security perimeters, the more the better. Mostly it was wires with bells attached to them, moats of broken glass and accordion wire, and walls made of assorted junk, but they might even find generator-powered electric fences, motion detectors, and infrared cameras. This one was different. They could see lights up ahead before they came to the first perimeter defense, and it wasn’t much of an obstacle.
It was an old sheep fence with barbed wire coiled along the top on the inside. The idiots had made it easy to get in—the wire should have been on the outside of the fence. Danny tapped Topper’s arm: stop. The handful of closely placed lights burning at the bottom of the next hill meant a building with windows. They were still a kilometer distant, but in that heavy darkness the lights stood out like beacons.
“You go around that way, toward the back. I’ll come down the road. If I draw any fire, you rush in behind and get the fuckers while they’re facing the other way.”
Topper made a noise of disapproval.
“What?” Danny said.
“I still think it’s a setup. That driver was trying to lure you down this goddamn road, and you know it. Now they got all the lights on and the windows ain’t even boarded up, and you think you’re just going to draw some blind fire? Hell no. This here is a big old fucking piece of mouse cheese.”
“If they see me coming, they won’t look for you, that’s the whole point.”
“I’m just trying to say be careful, Sheriff. Don’t go and get yourself killed.”
“I hadn’t really planned on it.”
9
Two minutes later, Danny had reached the dirt road again. Her boots crunched on the loose grit like it was breakfast cereal. She drew a steadying breath and began her march toward the house.
She was within rifle shot now, if it had been daylight. But they wouldn’t be able to get a bead on her for a while yet in the dark—even a good night scope would have trouble picking her out at this distance. She kept on walking, her steps amplified in the cool, clear air. She passed through a broken-down gate, a continuation of the s
heep fence they’d come up against. It wasn’t even locked; there was a gap she could step through.
And as she did so, the floodlights came on.
Danny tossed herself back through the gate and crouched low against one of the crooked posts. Her eyes throbbed with the sudden brightness. There were lights mounted on the roof of the main building, about a fifty-second sprint from her location. They revealed a ranch yard: barns, sheds, a main house, vacant animal pens. Fences running every which way inside a taller fence that marked the borders of the ranch compound itself. No gunshots rang through the night, no shrilling alarms or shouting. Just the lights, staring across the dry grass like sunlight on the moon, colorless and severe with long inky shadows.
They must be automatic, Danny thought. If the occupants were truly looking, they couldn’t have failed to see her. But they weren’t doing anything about it. Maybe waiting for a better shot. Still, Danny’s role here was to draw fire.
She hitched up her gun belt, took a few deep drags of air, and then sprinted through the gap in the gate, running zigzag for the nearest cover—a pickup truck on blocks near a cattle pen.
She got behind the truck without incident.
Now she stole along the margin of the pen, then broke cover and ran for a long, low shed. She got her back up against that and dipped around the corner.
No sign of life from the main house.
She drew her Beretta out of its holster and thumbed the safety up. She would use the pistol for cover fire to make her enemies duck, save the shotgun for when she got to the building and needed to clear a room.
She swiftly reached the house. Still nothing.
Okay, now things are getting weird.
It appeared nobody was home. Where was the Chevelle? She could still smell dust in the air; it had come this way. But it was not in the yard as far as she could see, and none of the outbuildings would provide sufficient cover. She decided to join Topper around the back, in case it was there.
She kept below the windows and skirted the house; at the rear corner, she risked a hissed signal and waved to Topper, who was hiding behind a stack of rusting natural gas cylinders. Always a good place to seek cover—people were afraid to shoot at fuel tanks, as a rule, and they were made of heavy steel. No sign of the Chevelle, but there was an open gate at the back of the property and the long straight road continued into the darkness behind it.
