by Ben Tripp
• • •
Kelley could not precisely remember the sensation of life, but there were things that survived the transition from life to undeath. These things remained with her as memories of someone else. None of her old tastes had survived. She didn’t care for grilled hot dogs with brown mustard anymore. It would have infuriated the living version of herself. As she now was, she didn’t care. It was inconvenient but not important. She felt like a shark that remembered another life as a human being. The taste of blood had made her want nothing more than to be just a shark, feeding, always feeding.
This was the torment of the thinkers, when they were not hungry. They were perfectly alone, no matter how many gathered together to hunt men. And lost, driven only by appetite. They scarcely knew who they were. Only what they needed. Not long before, money had affected people like that, consuming the lives of the living. Never enough, every taste of the stuff making them want more. Making them forget who they were.
Then again—back in those days, nobody got paid for chewing the flesh off a human head.
• • •
Kelley clung to her relationship with Danny, such as it was, because it connected her to what she had been before. Now she was afraid that the hunger would replace everything she’d been clinging to. She had experienced a unique moment as she emerged from the brief sleep of natural death. It had shown her a lightning flash of her true self. Then it was gone. She sought to reclaim that light, to see the thing once more and take it back into herself. The hunger made it impossible even to conjure up in her mind.
Her thoughts moved at the same pace as before, but their purpose was different. Once, the future had occupied her attention; now there was only hunger or not-hunger, the two outcomes.
She had no use for abstractions anymore. Her thoughts were becoming more practical, more single-minded with every passing hour. Nothing should have intruded on her lust for bloody flesh.
But this one creature, her sister, was a riddle that she must answer. She was the key to what Kelley had become, the unbroken mirror in which she had glimpsed herself.
Kelley hoped she would understand soon, because the stench of her sister’s body renewed her hunger with every passing moment. And once again, her thoughts were upon the flavor of Danny’s blood, always circling.
14
The zeroes were getting thick. Swarming. There had been a city not far from the interstate, once a stop on the intercontinental railway and now a stop on the road. The area, as the earlier travelers had said, was worse than anywhere Danny had seen—and they were still only at the fringes of the swarm. All moaners, at least so far. No hunters or thinkers, or the stupid zeroes would have avoided them.
Danny rolled the windows down an inch. Not enough to let any clutching hands in, but enough so that Kelley’s fishy, decayed smell was released outside the vehicle. It made the moaners recoil. They stumbled over each other to get out of the way.
Kelley’s words still rung in her ears. One of these days, probably soon, the hunger was going to get the better of her, and Kelley would try to kill Danny. She didn’t doubt it for a moment. The only real question was how long they had left together.
Topper called Danny on the radio, breaking the musty silence. “There’s too fuckin’ many, Sheriff. We’re gonna get knocked off our bikes. Over.”
“Copy,” Danny said. “Fall back and I’ll see how far we can go in the interceptor. If I fuck it up, you may need to shoot your way in to us, can you handle that, over?”
“Aye-aye,” Topper replied. “Over’n out.”
It was clear they wouldn’t be able to travel much farther. If the Chevelle and its truck had indeed come this way, they must also have avoided giving away their thinker scent; otherwise the roadway would be clear. But Danny didn’t see how they could have progressed through the swarm in this area by any other means. The moaners lurched around like gigantic, bipedal termites in a nest, moving in dense crowds, aimlessly, sometimes scattering until they were spread out, the way strangers spread out on train platforms, but eventually massing together again. Often they would crowd together until they were jammed cheek to rotten cheek.
She saw one with big yellowish knobs all over its exposed skin, like veiny mushrooms. There was another that looked like it had been shot in the face with raisins—they could almost have been huge blackheads, erupting through the gray flesh. Then they passed one with fleshy filaments growing out of its face, like that which had bitten Danny the previous night. It resembled a mask made of week-old hamburger. Most of the zeroes were clad in slack, dead skin of the usual kind, but these few stood out for their hideous originality. Maybe there were zero diseases going around. A whole new biology.
Equally disturbing was that a great number of the undead here appeared to be the remains of children. Thin, gray little things with yawning mouths.
“The wind has shifted,” Danny said aloud, not expecting an answer. “It’s coming out of the west now. That’s why the radios are working, I think. It’s the only variable. I wonder what that means.”
The radio was the least of her worries, however. The city wasn’t near enough to explain the swarm. Danny was able to drive as far as an overpass into town, but the narrow area beneath the bridge so concentrated the zeroes that there was no way to physically push the car through the throng, not even if they smelled the thinker inside. They couldn’t get out of the way. The vehicle would be overcome, like driving into a mountain of cow carcasses. Greasy handprints slathered the windows and doors. The cacophony of their muddled voices filled the stinking air.
“They didn’t come this way,” Kelley said, ignoring the moaners outside the glass like a celebrity snubbing the paparazzi. “If they did, these ones would still be retreating.”
“And you don’t smell them?” Danny asked.
Kelley didn’t respond for a while, and Danny thought maybe she was giving one of her nonanswers, the closest thing she had to a lie.
But then she said, “No. I can only smell the blood inside your skin.”
Danny hooked the steering wheel over and made a slow, bumpy U-turn through the swarm. A couple of them went under the wheels. A skeletal child scraped the stumps of its arms over the hood. Then they were pointed back the way they came, and the undead thinned out.
The blood inside your skin.
Danny considered the options as she slalomed between the moaners, steering like a cartoon drunk through the widest gaps in the swarm, heading back the way they’d come. The ones that had smelled Kelley before were struggling up the embankments and through the fields to get away.
“Kelley? Where do you think the other driver has gone?”
Kelley was silent a while, then inhaled carefully and said, “That way.” She pointed north.
“Away from the city?”
“Yes.”
Danny wasn’t sure how many questions Kelley would take before she said she didn’t understand and shut down. But it was worth asking.
“Why did he go north?”
“He couldn’t go that way,” she said, and indicated the direction from which they had come—the heart of the swarm. After that, she didn’t respond to further questions. Danny was baffled.
Was she lying by omission, or just lying? Danny wanted to wring the thin, mushy neck. Demand answers. It felt sometimes like Kelley already knew the entire big picture but only hinted at it to keep her guessing.
Then again, it could also be that Kelley didn’t have anything else to say. She’d been silent in life, too.
Danny decided to take Kelley’s word for it, as far as it went. The zeroes were thinned out to the north, swarming thickest to the east and south. It made sense to carry a cargo of children in a less-infested direction, after all. Danny had seen swarms overturn buses and trucks. They’d go mad at the sweet stink of unwashed kids. So the Chevelle might very well have veered north, rather than punch straight through the thickest part of the swarm, even if that was the most direct route to the zero-free zone be
yond. On their own, thinkers could pass through the swarm like a razor through the belly of a rotten dog. That might change with a cargo of human flesh behind them.
A few minutes beyond the fringes of the swarm, Danny saw one highway exit that looked like the best way north; she asked Kelley if that was the way the others had gone, but there was no reply. It had to be the one. Long, straight road, plowed through the abandoned cornfields, which were fallow because all the mutant genetically engineered corn was sterile. Weeds taking over, Roundup be damned. The road was two lanes, ran due north, and although she saw a couple of scratchy silhouettes of undead moving across the fields, there wasn’t any particular energy to them. They were individual walking corpses, not part of the swarm. She would herself have gone that way, if she were the kidnappers. At least, it was a place to start.
She radioed the bikers, and the signal got through, for once. They rendezvoused at the off-ramp and headed up the road, bikes first, Danny a little way behind. She watched the motorcycles, admiring these tough, no-nonsense men. They were scared shitless half the time, the same as her, the same as everybody. But they strapped the fear down tight and kept on doing what needed to be done. She was grateful. They made a lot of crap decisions, of course, but that was human nature. Danny did, too. She was beginning to think that was the foremost quality of leadership: the willingness to make decisions, good or bad, and insist others work with them.
After a few kilometers, they reached the train tracks that ran parallel to the interstate. In places the tracks came much closer, as each mode of transport found different ways around features in the terrain. At the tracks, running alongside them, was another two-lane road—probably the original route the interstate replaced. Danny could see an abandoned motel and a no-name gas station not far away. The places that had been knocked off the main route when the interstates went through had never recovered, three-quarters of a century later.
Danny and the scouts stopped at the intersection of the two roads. Kelley raised herself out of the vehicle and stood a little distance away, facing down the road they’d come along. Danny stretched her always-stiff back.
“Nothing could have got through that swarm,” she said.
“I never seen anything like that,” Conn said, his voice grating like stones.
“But,” said Topper, turning a slow circle, “which way did they go from here?”
“No point going west,” Danny said. “That’s where these fuckers came from. Tribe’s there. The swarm is south. So that narrows it down to one-half of the fuckin’ compass—east or north.”
“Your sister have an opinion?” Conn asked.
“North, she says,” Danny muttered. They rarely mentioned Kelley by name. It was always unnerving.
Danny spat on the ground and walked in a wide arc around the intersection. Brown grass sprouted from the cracked pavement. Winter was coming fast, so the plants had gone to sleep, but in the spring this road would be half-overgrown. It amazed Danny how fast things were breaking down.
“Sheriff . . .” Topper said, “if the kidnappers ain’t zeroes, and the price is one kid per adult to get into the safe place like that prisoner says, then it makes sense. Could be a human gang, and once they got enough kids collected for all of ’em they drive to the safe place and get in, right?”
“But the kidnappers are zeroes,” Danny said. “You saw that ranch. They were holed up there at least a couple of weeks, waiting for somebody like us to come by. Eating their prisoners. We scared them off. But they still got our kids with them, and probably more, if they got a truck. That means they’re gonna eat them, too.”
“So they could of gone anywhere. Or maybe they’re hidden behind that wall over there, waiting for us to go away,” Topper said. “They got nothing to fear from moaners, if they’re thinkers. So we ain’t got a thing to go on. The trail is stone cold.”
Nobody had anything to add. There wasn’t much left to do but acknowledge failure. Conn leaned against his immense Harley with his legs stuck out like a kickstand. Topper stood in the center of the intersection and continued his slow rotation around the compass. Danny walked in her circle.
Then she stopped by the railway tracks, frozen in position. Both men knew what that meant. She’d seen something, or had an idea. Danny stepped over a broken candy-stripe signal arm, then knelt beside the nearest rail.
“Do you hear that?” She placed the flat of her hand against the rusty steel.
“No,” Topper said.
“It’s over here. The rail is kind of singing. It’s real faint. But I can feel it.”
This got the bikers’ attention. Topper and Conn hustled over to the tracks and bent down to feel the rail.
“Train coming?” Topper said.
“Who the fuck would run a train out here?” Danny shook her head.
But what else could it be? The rail beneath her hand was vibrating, although in such a subtle way it felt more like a mild electrical current than anything else. And they could all hear it now. A faint, high keening sound, possibly the vibration of the sand and pebbles against the track, or steel against steel.
“If that’s a train,” Conn said, “it’s a long goddamn ways off. But it could be those kidnapping assholes took off by rail. Or maybe they’re on this here road and the rails are picking it up.”
This was the longest speech Danny had ever heard Conn make. Even Topper looked surprised.
“Fuckin’ detective,” Topper observed. “One-man FBI.”
“Fuck you,” Conn said.
“It’s a good idea,” Danny remarked, ignoring the witless banter. “Makes sense. They’re on the rails, traveling west or east.”
“You know what,” Topper said. “I’m an asshole. I just remembered there was a train west of here where I picked up the Silent Kid. It was on this same line, I’m pretty sure of it. No engine, just some cars.”
“So if there’s a working train,” Danny said, “it’s going east.”
“Or headed for a high-speed crash.”
“I’m gonna make the call,” Danny said, squeezing the air with her one good fist. “We follow the tracks east. We’re already falling behind by the minute.”
“You think somebody got the trains running?” Conn said, doubtful. He was squinting down the tracks, his stony forehead crumpled with concentration. “That would be a hell of a thing. Zeroes couldn’t stop a train. Might be a kick-ass way to travel.”
• • •
They drove onward. Danny’s mind was racing. So many possibilities. There was no question that something was moving on those rails, or close beside them. She couldn’t remember how far that kind of vibration traveled, although she had some dim memory of learning it in high school. A unit on waves of energy in water, air, metal, and stone, and as she recalled it was water that sound would travel through the farthest. The rest was a blur. She was more interested in sex back then. And beer.
But it seemed to her that noise could run a long, long way down a railway line.
How far would they have to go to find out? The lives of those children probably depended on the answer. She remembered that hideous, bloody thing hanging in the ranch, unrecognizable but still alive. No more. Not on her watch. She’d told the Silent Kid she would personally keep him out of danger.
Was he among the stolen children? He must be, unless he just ran into the darkness. In which case, he’d probably been eaten anyway. Nobody could keep him safe. Danny was just another bullshitter.
The zeroes got thicker as they drove east; they were a couple of kilometers north of where they’d reached the swarm on the freeway. If this was part of the same mass, the swarm was colossal, the biggest they’d ever encountered. It got so infested the bikes had to fall back behind the interceptor, which was equipped to ram the undead.
They moved through a couple of small two-story towns that once served as suburbs for the city up ahead, although they were run-down little places, mostly having dealt in lottery tickets, auto parts, and cheap food, as
far as Danny could tell. Now they dealt in nothing, of course. There was a skeletal woman hanging from an upstairs window, half-in, half-out, as if someone had hung her out to dry. There was hardly any flesh left to hold her remains together, a matted flag of yellow hair dangling from her partially exposed skull. The roadway was mostly free of abandoned vehicles, presumably because everybody took the interstate to get out of there. But the undead were out in force, lurching through doorways, out of alleys, and crawling from beneath parked cars at the sound of the approaching humans.
The motorcycles were a liability again. Danny pulled over into a fenced tractor dealership parking lot; Kelley climbed out of the vehicle and the moaners stopped in their tracks, sucking the air to taste it. The bikers pulled up alongside.
“You guys get on back to the convoy,” Danny said. “I’ll keep pushing through. Zeroes gonna get one of you at the rate we’re going.”
“We can keep on,” Topper said. He was invested in the mission.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Take that route north we saw back there at the railroad crossing. Odds are just as good they went that way. But one of us has to report back to the Tribe. The radio is fucked again. The wind changed around before, did you notice that? And then the radios worked. It was blowing east for a little while. Anyway, it’s blowing this way again so we’re gonna have to hand-deliver word back to the Tribe. Conn, you comfortable splitting up?”
“Do I look like a fuckin’ delivery boy?”
