by Ben Tripp
They met in the middle of the back wall of the house and took up positions on either side of the back door, which led into a mudroom with the kitchen beyond.
“You see anybody inside?” Danny whispered.
“No, nobody,” said Topper.
“Huh.”
“Yeah, I know. Weird.”
The lights in the house were blazing, the only sound was the hum of a generator running in one of the barns. They both raised their weapons. Danny pumped her fist three times, because she didn’t have enough fingers on that hand to count to three, and then they stormed through the screen door, Danny first.
The only thing that came at them was the stench of rotten meat.
The original occupants of the ranch were long gone. Human beings hadn’t taken their place.
It could only be zeroes that had squatted there recently—thinkers. Hunters wouldn’t know to fire up the generator.
The air was dripping with a miasma of decay, heavy clouds of flies motoring through it. The mudroom was undisturbed. There were rubber boots, jackets, rakes in there. The kitchen was mostly untouched as well, mundane clutter under the bright fluorescent lights, dirty dishes, a coffee cup with a black crust in the bottom. Zeroes don’t cook. Bloody footprints all over the floor, however, told of worse to come.
Sure enough, the next room—the dining room, it must once have been—was a scene from hell.
The fly-studded chandelier cast yellow light on a four-walled cesspool. There was a gelatinous coat of rotten blood halfway up the walls, the ceiling spattered with it, the floor toe-deep in the stuff. It was so rancid it bubbled in places, seething with maggots. They could hear it fizzing. No furniture in there, but in the middle of the room, a four-foot-high pile of animal remains. Human and sheep, maybe. Impossible to tell. Topper suddenly puked at the threshold of the dining room, his vomit diluting the stew of gore. Retching, he followed Danny around the perimeter of the room, boots sucking through the effluent, both of them covering their noses and mouths with their sleeves. Neither of them spoke. In the center hall, Topper went left and Danny went right.
She made it all the way to the front parlor before her own belly gave up, because that’s where they’d hung the children.
Topper was somewhere in the back and Danny was alone in the parlor when she saw them. The cadavers were roped up on hooks in the ceiling. They had been eaten where they hung, nothing left of them but blackening red pulp in the shape of marionettes. Even then, Danny might have been able to keep her gorge down. But as she passed the swaying remains, one of them lifted its head.
It couldn’t speak without lips, but Danny didn’t need to discuss the options. The child tried to say something, its eyes staring from crimson, lidless sockets. How life remained in that skinless husk, Danny could not imagine.
“Mercy shot!” she shouted, breaking the silence.
She put a bullet through its brain, ran back out to the front of the house, and heaved her guts out.
If she hadn’t gone outside, she wouldn’t have seen the flare.
10
By the flickering light of the flare, Danny and Topper ran down the dirt road—the direct route back to the interceptor. But the interceptor was on its way to them. It never occurred to Danny that Kelley could still drive. But there she was, piloting the police car down that rutted strip with skill and considerable speed.
“Get over!” Danny barked as the vehicle braked to a halt beside her. A thick cloud of dust washed past them. Kelley slid across the bench seat and Danny took the wheel. Topper threw himself into the back, his heels up on the hard plastic seat. A chassis-banging power turn took them across the rough grass and then they were racing at high speed for the main road and the way back to the truck stop. Danny switched on the siren and the roof lights. They were going in hot.
“That fucking Chevelle is long gone,” Danny barked. “What the hell happened?” There was a lot of confused gabble half-buried in static on the radio. Nobody was answering her calls. They were still several kilometers from the truck stop.
“I heard gunshots on the radio, and then screaming,” Kelley said. “It sounded like the kind of thing you’d want a flare for. So I launched a flare.”
“So nobody told you what it is? Do we know what’s happening?”
“From the noises I heard, the convoy is under attack. But the signal is really bad.” At the end of this speech, Kelley ran out of breath, and the final words were forced out of empty lungs in a rush. She didn’t take another breath to replace it.
Topper was separated from the front of the vehicle by a thick acrylic partition; he’d never been so close to the Leper, partition or no—he kept her at a safe distance, about the extent of a machete swing. Danny glanced in the rearview mirror and caught his expression.
“She doesn’t bite,” she remarked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
“I’m still shitting myself about all that blood in the house,” Topper said, changing the subject.
“You didn’t see the worst of it,” Danny said. She didn’t expand on the subject. He’d heard the mercy shot. There had been a dying survivor; no point getting into the details. She had the outlines of a plan and preferred to focus on that.
“You saw that road out back of the ranch there. You figure the Chevelle went out that way?”
“Must of,” Topper said. “I smelled exhaust when I got there, diesel and transmission smoke. Not just the Chevelle. I think there’s a truck, too. They knew that shit in the house would slow us right the fuck down.”
“We’ll have to deal with them later. When we get back to the Tribe, we’re entering a dynamic situation. We may have surprise on our side. If the road is clear, I’m going to drive by once so we can see what’s going on, then we’ll come in wherever it’s hottest, okay? I’ll pop the doors from up here. Come out shooting if that’s how it is. There’s the lights.”
• • •
It was standard procedure to flood the Tribe’s encampment with light if a zero attack occurred; there were spotlights on roof mounts for the purpose. Otherwise it was campfires only, to avoid attracting attention. Fires were a common sight at night—electric light, exceedingly rare.
The entire plaza was lit up now.
Danny raced the interceptor over the crest of a low hill and the scene was revealed before them like a Civil War diorama in a museum. Dozens of figures were running around, chasing long shadows across the tarmac. There was gunfire and smoke. Within moments, they could differentiate men and zeroes: It looked like the place had been assaulted by a big pack of the hunters. Their scuttling, apelike shapes were charging around after anything that moved. Danny saw someone go down under two of the things, and three of the living rushed to pull them off.
Then the interceptor was screaming past the scene. It took all the discipline Danny had not to crane her neck to watch what was happening—but there were people running across the road. She needed eyes front. There was a hunter capering after one of the fleeing figures—she swerved twice and slammed into it. The creature whacked into the hood, cut nearly in half by the wire across the nose of the car, and then was sucked under the wheels. Danny punched the brake and swung the car around, using its velocity to complete a 180-degree switch. Topper banged heavily against the acrylic partition behind her.
The scene was in front of them now. Chaos, hand-to-hand combat. She powered the interceptor forward into the melee, crushing another of the zombies in a spray of black fluid.
“No! You stay in here,” she said to Kelley, who had begun to climb out. “Friendly fire.” She popped the rear locks, Topper threw himself out of the backseat, and they were running into the fight.
The battle was impossible to make sense of. Everybody was everywhere, no sides. Several zeroes were going after the White Whale, but Wulf Gunnar was up on the roof of the RV, methodically dropping the creatures with his vintage bolt-action Winchester. It looked like he had several young children up there with him. Somebody was pushing th
em up through the skylight from inside. There were clusters of struggling figures all over the place.
Danny figured the only thing to do was to start killing.
She took down three of the things with ten shots. Guns weren’t that useful against the hunters. They were too fast and a head shot was difficult because they ran with their heads tucked down almost to the ground. You had to hit them once in their center mass to stop them, and then shoot the brain. Danny kicked away another of the things that was tearing a meaty flap of skin off a woman who had joined the Tribe only a few days earlier. The woman would be dead by morning. Danny clubbed the rebounding hunter in the face with the butt of the shotgun, then struck it in the temple with a golfer’s swing. Its head caved in. The wounded woman was trying to squash the wobbling slab of flesh back on her shoulder, as if it would glue into place. Blood streamed out from beneath it.
There was a lot of gunfire. A stray bullet zinged past her, close.
“Get your backs up against the Whale!” she shouted. Several people heard, and ran in that direction. The simple fact that their leader was on the scene galvanized some folks out of their panic. Wulf shot several more zeroes once people started to move in a consistent direction and he had clear fire. Word was passing around.
Danny ran for the RV herself. A man reeled across her path with a hunter clinging to his back. It hadn’t bitten him yet, but he wasn’t in any position to defend himself. He was one of the older guys in the Tribe. Danny got hold of one of the hunter’s limbs, pulling the hard, dry bones to haul the thing off. It hooked its other arm around the man’s neck and drew itself back in.
Its teeth found the man’s throat. He shrilled a scream of fear and agony. Then a withered claw came into Danny’s field of view from behind the hunter. Kelley. She thrust bony fingers into the monster’s eye sockets and pulled its head back until the spine broke. But the thing’s jaws didn’t release even as it was destroyed; a jet of smoking blood sprayed out of the wounded man’s throat and spattered Kelley’s face. She lurched backward.
At the same instant, a bullet took the top of the victim’s head off. He and the hunter fell in a pile and the blood poured out of him as from an overturned milk bottle. Danny shoved Kelley to the ground and covered her.
“That was meant for you!” she shouted.
Kelley didn’t answer. Instead, the same claw, now black with hunter blood, caught Danny by the throat.
“The fuck!” Danny croaked, and slapped the hand away. The power in her sister’s limbs was shocking, but she hadn’t been hanging on at full strength. Those long yellow teeth were bared, inches from her face.
“The fuck,” Danny said again, shoving Kelley away. The two of them sprawled on the bloody pavement. Kelley got her legs under herself first. For a few seconds, she crouched in front of Danny, no different than the hunters, head low, limbs bent. Then something snapped back into place inside her mind—that’s how it looked to Danny—because in the next moment Kelley was running into the smoke and shadows. Danny expected to see her shot down, but all the gunfire seemed to be directed toward the outer edges of the action. She wanted to go after Kelley, and took a few steps in that direction. She couldn’t see how the fight was going anymore. It was all noise and motion.
Kelley wasn’t the main concern right now, or more people would die. Danny looked around, seeking some pattern. The hunters were working in pack formations again, trying to cut people off from the defensive line. She saw Topper and Charity join up with Ernie and some of the other mean sons of bitches she relied on most. They were felling the zeroes with machetes and sledgehammers, out of ammo.
Danny saw a string of the hunters hunching along behind the long row of gas pumps that formed the centerpiece of the plaza. They were going to get behind the Whale and attack from the far side. She shouted for someone to cut them off, but no lone voice was decipherable in the chaos. She broke into a run. It might have been too late already. Several of them seemed to have broken through the line.
Danny took aim with the shotgun, squeezing the trigger on one of the gas pumps. The weapon barked, a tongue of white fire leaping out of the barrel, and then the pump exploded in a mushroom of greasy orange fire. That ignited the next one, and the next. And then one of the underground tanks must have caught fire, because a jet of blindingly bright flame belched into the air and rained down on the hunters.
Danny had forgotten about the sabot rounds loaded in the shotgun. She might as well have launched an antiaircraft rocket. The creatures flailed in the flames.
She flashed back for an instant to the first time she’d fought the zeroes, a lifetime ago, when she’d blown up the gas tank of a car and nearly killed herself. The explosion had killed Patrick’s boyfriend. A dozen of the hunters were blazing like fatwood now, scarecrows of red fire wheeling around setting others alight. Somebody in the convoy was shooting at them, dropping the burning ones.
A spidery shape came out of the darkness—Danny was still mostly blinded by the explosion—and knocked her down. For an instant she thought it was Kelley, and her guard was slow to come up. She felt dry, broken teeth latch on to her arm, tearing through her jacket sleeve. She had the shotgun across her chest, and used it to shove the monster away. It came at her again. There was something wrong with its skin—not just the usual decay and mummification, but weird, wormlike growths coming out of its face like a beard made out of long, thin warts. Its mouth was a dark crater in the middle of this stuff. The horror of that made Danny recoil. She got the shotgun into its mouth. Its head vanished in a fountain of black puke as she squeezed the trigger. Then she was running for the White Whale.
11
The fires were still burning bright when the last of the hunters was brought down. Danny demanded to know if anyone had seen how the attack started. She didn’t mention her personal concern: Had Kelley lied to her? Had there been hunters waiting in a ditch, and she hadn’t mentioned them? Nobody had an explanation—the zeroes were suddenly in their midst, as far as anybody knew—until Wulf came down off the White Whale.
“You son of a bitch,” Danny said when he shambled up to her.
“Fuck off, Sheriff. Your sister gone bad and you know it. You think just because she dropped outta the same cunt as you she ain’t a man-eating monster?”
“She’s never eaten human flesh, asshole. You tried to kill her and you killed one of the living.”
Wulf wouldn’t look into Danny’s eyes. He watched the tip of his rifle barrel hovering just above the pavement.
“He was already dead. Get out of my face.”
Danny got closer, shoving herself up into his line of sight. She had enough adrenaline in her system to freak out a blue whale, and she needed a target, and he’d asked for it. She heard some familiar voices calling to each other in the background. She heard her name. It only made her angrier. She felt something pop inside her head, like a valve breaking, and white-hot rage flooded her limbs and made the darkness around her shimmer with supernatural light. She had to look at her hands to see what weapon she had. How she was going to kill him. Shotgun.
“Danny! Danny, what the hell?!”
It was Patrick. Covered in blood, grabbing her arms to control the weapon. He pushed it down, trying to keep it aimed at the ground. Danny jabbed him in the gut with the stock and he stumbled back, colliding with Wulf.
“Get out of this, Patrick!” she barked.
“I won’t,” he said. “Wulf’s not the enemy.”
“He tried to put Kelley down.”
Danny considered shooting Patrick, too. She could hit them both with one shot. It would be cathartic to turn this thing into a dictatorship. It would only take a single trigger-pull, and she’d be the dictator.
“Kelley is a danger to everyone, Danny,” Patrick implored. “She is. She is. Wulf’s a dick. He’s an awful person. But he’s one of the living and we can’t kill each other. He’s Tribe. We got to stick together.”
“Kelley’s tribe, too, fucker,” she said. Th
e color was draining out of Patrick’s face. He could see the murder in her eyes.
“Jesus Christ, Sheriff, calm down. You on the rag or some shit?” He clapped a paw on Patrick’s shoulder. “Listen to this faggot. He’s talking sense for once.”
“Gee, thanks a lot, asshole,” Patrick remarked.
The anger was exhilarating. All the things Danny worried about were gone. Consequences, responsibility, the plan, they were gone. There was only righteous fury.
“No. You listen here, you hairy old pile of shit. So much as look at Kelley again and I will put a bullet through your fucking brain, you hear me? You aren’t worth jack to me. She is. You know what? Fuck it, why make threats. Say something else and I’ll fucking kill you right here, right now. Say it. Give me a reason.”
Wulf stuck his barrel chest out and spat on the ground.
“Fire away, then,” he said. “I ain’t got time for your little titty-baby feelings about some half-rotten zombie whore. You dumb fuckin’ pussy.”
A blade of pain slid down the cleft in her brain, pierced her corpus callosum, and twisted. It hurt so much she thought she might pass out. Then it was gone—only a moment had elapsed—and it was gone, along with the anger.
She saw what the old man was doing. He was baiting her. He’d overplayed his hand with the “whore” and revealed it was a ploy. He probably wanted to die. Death by cop. Danny was not going to give him that satisfaction.
She stepped back another stride and tossed the shotgun to Patrick.
“Thanks for sharing,” she said. “Let’s talk about what you saw from up on top of the Whale.”
