by Ben Tripp
“We was wondering the same thing. So far we can’t make it out. There’s land mines on this little road leads to where the kids are at around the far side of the mountain, which is why they take the train this way instead. Weirdest thing is this: They got a perimeter of scouts scattered around all over the place, kind of in rings around here as far out as five, six miles. But they don’t do shit, they just stand around and none of the zeroes come close.”
“Could they be thinkers?”
“Not real fuckin’ likely. Why would thinkers stand around in the desert like assholes when they could be eating fresh meat back here?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation for the swarm staying put.”
“Could be more radiation, too. I guess you should know this: We killed one of them. Practically drove over him on our way to scout this place out a few days back. He told us to ‘halt’ like some German asshole from The Dirty Dozen. Conn got off his hog, they didn’t agree on much, and next thing you know the guy’s dead with a broke neck. He wasn’t no thinker. He was one of us. But he looked real ill, and we thought maybe he had radiation poisoning or like that. Or cancer. Pale as fuck, and he smelled weird. Anyways a search party must of come around after that but we were long-gone. The body weren’t there next day, so they probably picked him up. We got his radio, but they don’t say much.”
“The whole thing stinks,” Danny said. “But I can’t figure out where the smell is coming from.”
7
There was another tolling of church bells and gathering of the faithful in the early evening, but not much else happened that day in Happy Town.
It grew colder as the shadows lengthened. A mean-spirited wind swept over the ridge and poured down on them as the sun went down. Danny and Topper retreated into the shelter, which was stale as a clothes hamper, but kept the chill out; when the light failed, they were in darkness. It was too risky to use even the dim red key-chain light Danny kept on her tool belt.
“You’re all right,” she said to Topper, after they had sat in silence for a while.
“I wish we had something to fuckin’ drink,” Topper said. “Take the edge off.”
“I quit the stuff,” Danny said, surprising herself. And it occurred to her this might actually be true, especially after the epic bender with Wulf. She’d been tormented by thirst lately, but since that blinding headache, she hadn’t touched the booze. Her body didn’t care what the real diagnosis was: It thought that crisis was a hangover, and it revolted at the thought of alcohol.
“No shit,” Topper said. “For real?”
“Yeah. At least for the time being,” Danny said. She was starting to feel defensive, like quitting the alcohol was something shameful. Maybe an admission that she had a problem before. Which it probably was. They were lying inside the dark shelter staring up at the tarpaulin overhead, seeing nothing. The wind made the shelter expand and contract, rustling.
“Let’s check out the lights,” Topper said. “It’s something to see.”
They crawled out and stood on the rim of the ledge looking down at Happy Town. No need to conceal themselves now. Even night vision goggles couldn’t penetrate this far into the darkness. The entire town was lit up: rooftop searchlights, streetlights, windows with lamps in them, even shop signs and some Christmas lights strung up here and there. It looked so out of place in the dark world, and yet this would once have been an unremarkable sight. There was so much light flooding the town that Danny could see Topper in the reflected glow.
“Looks like old times,” Topper observed.
“Where the fuck is the power coming from?”
“Near as we can tell,” Topper said, “they’re sending it down the power lines alongside the railroad. From upriver. Might be a generator up there.”
Danny couldn’t stop staring at all the lights. “I don’t know what they’re up to, but you gotta hand it to them. This is one major operation with its shit stowed secure.”
“There’s even a whorehouse,” Topper said, apropos of nothing.
“Not a surprise. The church doesn’t mind?”
“Hail Mary and lie down with Jezebel, as my old man used to say.”
“Who’s Jezebel?”
“Some chick from the Bible.”
“That’s why I went into law enforcement instead of prostitution,” Danny said, watching the glittering lights of the town below. “After my combat barbecue, I couldn’t get laid with a million-dollar bill up my twat.”
“Aw, hell,” Topper said, laughing quietly. “At this point I’d fuck a saguaro cactus if it agreed to throw in a handjob.”
They both laughed at that.
“Let’s go,” he said, and to Danny’s surprise, kissed her. It was the right move.
Unexpectedly, her mouth flooded with desire. She found she was grabbing his neck with all seven of her fingers, and there wasn’t enough air in the world. She groped in the shadows and found the hot weight of his balls inside his jeans. Danny was suddenly, almost painfully turned on like she hadn’t been in years. There was a hot pink wire running straight through the middle of her, and she wanted this man to pluck it till it broke.
Halfway through their lovemaking, all the lights of town went out except for the sweep lights on the roofs; it was midnight, at which time they shut off the grid every night.
• • •
Afterward, neither of them knew what to say, so they didn’t. Danny picked a hair out of her mouth and they sat in the darkness with the tarpaulin against their heads, panting for breath. Then they slept for a while. Danny awoke around 0400 hours and shook Topper awake. He was snoring, which for some reason filled her with affection.
“Get your clothes on. I’ve got a new plan,” she said, lacing on her boots. An idea had come to her while she slept.
“Honeymoon’s over,” Topper grunted.
“I’ll tell you where to find the Silent Kid and the woman I told you about. Name’s Vaxxine, like the shots. She’s in a wheelchair, but she’s hard as nails. You’ll like her. Anyway, soon as you can, rendezvous with them. Make sure you tell her I sent you, or she’ll kill you with a slingshot. I’ll give you their coordinates.”
“You’re not going back?”
“I’m going to follow that railway line to its source and see just what the fuck these assholes are up to. Find out where they’re taking these kids. I think it’s a concentration camp or something. If I’m not back in three days, figure me dead, you got that?”
“You’re gonna end up like Ernie, for chrissakes.”
“Come on, man. The fuck else are we supposed to do? There’s nothing to learn from up here. And there’s no other way into town, unless we do some Rambo commando shit and sneak around. That’s stupid.”
“Your whole idea is stupid,” Topper said. He took a risk and switched on a button flashlight, cupping it in his hands. He wanted to make eye contact. “You go off and get killed, that’s step one. We hook up with a cripple and a kid who don’t talk, step two. That’s it. That’s the plan.”
“You got a better idea?”
“Yeah. Let’s round up everybody we got left and get out of fuckin’ Dodge. Keep on looking for a safe place somewhere else. Or maybe we could take a chance down there. I don’t know. At least there ain’t no zeroes in the area. I’d rather deal with a human enemy than a undead one, personally.”
“What about Ernie?”
“Aw, they’ll probably just throw him out—he weren’t armed,” Topper said, and there was deep pain in his voice. He didn’t believe it.
Danny’s head was throbbing again. She didn’t want to argue about this. Her irritation was swelling up like a balloon, pressurizing her skull. It was a long, treacherous drive eastward through some of the most infested regions on the continent, according to rumors. But she couldn’t rest easy again if she didn’t know what was happening to the children.
She didn’t like the look of those boxcars.
8
Danny was on her way out
when the situation changed for the worse. Topper had helped her fill her pack for the multiple-day extension on her recon mission; he had some camping gear that would make things more pleasant, including electric socks and spare batteries. He reminded Danny of her long-gone mother preparing a bag lunch for school—turning chores into gestures of affection. He had disassembled the blind and left the tarpaulin under a tree, erasing any signs that there had been a lookout; now they were almost down to the river again. But then Danny’s headache came back. It was getting worse, fast.
She saw pulsing auras around everything, as if some weird light in the invisible spectrum had revealed itself to her. They stumbled through the darkness. At first she tried to ignore the pain, but it was becoming all she could think about. It reminded her of having to pee as a child and knowing Dad wasn’t going to stop the car. Holding it and holding it until she was writhing and sweating. Except this wasn’t the bellyache of a full bladder, it was knives jabbing her in the brain.
They were near the largest bridge by now, if her reckoning was correct. She went down on one knee.
“You okay?” Topper said, whispering.
“Been having these headaches,” Danny said.
“I can’t understand you,” Topper said. He was a dim outline against the false dawn in the sky, but Danny thought she could see him flashing in blue luminescent streaks.
“I said ‘you keep going and I’ll catch up,’ ” she wheezed.
“I still can’t understand. Are you sick or something? You ain’t talking right.”
“Go,” Danny barked. “Go now.”
There were voices up high somewhere. She must have shouted. The watchers had heard her. Topper threw her arm over his shoulder and began to half-carry Danny down the riverside, lurching over rocks and driftwood in the dark. The shouting was distant, but not distant enough. Then there were dogs barking. Danny shook herself out of Topper’s grip. She collapsed and vomited on the stones. Her head hurt so badly that the onrush of every wave of pain frightened her. She spat and hated that Topper’s hand was rubbing her back like a concerned preschool teacher. Just because they fucked didn’t make them responsible for each other. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“Can you understand me?”
“Now I can. What the fuck is happening to you?”
She spoke in short bursts, forcing each one out through clenched teeth. “Head’s fucked up. Keeps happening. You go. Find out where they’re taking the kids. Keep Vaxxine and the Silent Kid safe. I’ll get Ernie out. You got ten seconds.”
Topper stood there like a fool for five of them. Then he said, “I’m coming back for you,” and ran down the riprap shore of the river. Danny waited until the crash of his boots sounded distant enough, and then she drew the deepest breath she was capable of and shouted, “Over here!” at the full reach of her voice. A blazing white searchlight flamed on, plunging lances into her skull. The baying of dogs and shouts of men, the cackling of the mad, dark river, became the din of a tornado filled with lightning.
She pitched forward into darkness.
PART THREE
1
Kelley was alive again, laughing about something. For once, Danny didn’t think Kelley was laughing at her, so she wasn’t irritated. Their laughs were so different. Kelley’s was musical, pitched high. It reminded Danny of a ringtone. She looked around: The two of them were sitting in an apple orchard in Tehachapi, California. September, probably. Cloudless plate-blue sky overhead, cool shadows, warm sun. They were sitting at a picnic table eating steamed hot dogs with relish and mustard; Danny had diced onions on hers, as well. They were drinking lime Jarritos.
Kelley was around thirteen years old, wearing hand-me-down jeans and a checked shirt that had been Danny’s, some years earlier. They sat under the broken shade of an apple tree and watched people pick fruit and drop it into wicker bushel baskets—tourists, not farm laborers, enjoying a ritual return to the soil for an afternoon.
“You laugh, but I’m not kidding,” Danny said. “Like five years from now, you’re going to get bit by a zombie and turn into one yourself.”
“That’s crazy,” Kelley said. “Zombies aren’t even real.”
“Not yet,” Danny said. The hot dog was so tasty—fresh factory flavor, nothing spoiled or stale or scary-old. They weren’t planning to pick apples, but they’d seen the menu sign from the road and it was lunchtime, so they spontaneously stopped to eat. Exactly the kind of thing Danny never, ever did. Maybe they could pick some apples after all. Danny couldn’t quite remember where they were going that put them in Tehachapi. Something fun. Something just for Kelley. Because Danny was missing so much of her sister’s childhood with her military career.
Kelley had mustard on the side of her mouth. She was looking out at the rolling slope with the apple trees on it, one leg tucked underneath her. Danny felt relaxed for the first time in ages. Not cold or sore or beat-up. No migraine. Nothing to worry about. The dead lay firmly in their graves and the living walked free among the apple trees. Then a voice called across the parking lot behind them. It was Amy Cutter, fresh out of veterinary school. In fact, it looked like she had only just graduated. She was still wearing the burgundy suit jacket from the graduation photo.
“Hey, Danny!” she called. “Tell Diggler to do a number two!”
Danny looked around at her feet. There was Diggler, the famous potbellied pig who could shit on command. What the hell was he doing here? He seemed to be deep in conversation with a bug-eyed little dog with a flat face, rooting around under the table. That was the Silent Kid’s dog, she realized. It was like a big family reunion all of a sudden. She looked around. The Kid himself ought to be somewhere nearby.
She saw him standing under a tree, peering out from around the trunk. He looked worried. Not that it was unusual. But he looked like something was wrong. Danny wondered if he’d eaten too many apples. But then he pointed—Danny thought he was pointing at her, but then she saw it was Kelley. She turned to see what was the matter.
Kelley looked sad, all of a sudden. She was staring down at her half-eaten hot dog with an expression of regret.
“What’s the matter?” Danny asked. She seldom inquired after Kelley’s well-being, but this looked serious. Kelley shook her head and didn’t say. She was at that age when she stopped communicating, so that much made sense. But then Diggler and the little terrier bolted out from under the table and ran for the road. Amy wasn’t there anymore. In fact, Danny realized, there wasn’t anybody around. The Silent Kid, the dog, the pig, the tourists and farmers had all vanished. It was just her and Kelley. The leaves were falling from the trees and a breeze was blowing all the warm out of the air. Felt like fall coming in.
“Kelley?”
A black tear ran out of Kelley’s right eye.
“Are you sick?”
“I’m dead,” Kelley said, in a quiet voice. Danny saw that the tear-track had left a groove in her sister’s face, and now the skin around it was turning gray. The dab of mustard on her lip stood out vivid yellow against it. She became ash-pale, her eyes sunk in dark pools, her lips blue and flaking. Then a slab of her cheek fell away, and Danny could see teeth through the bloodless hole. Kelley raised her hand to inspect the crater and the fingers that explored it were rotten, the nails peeling off.
“Please don’t go,” Danny said. She didn’t know what to do next, except watch Kelley fall to pieces.
Kelley slumped forward, coming apart like waterlogged bread by now, the picnic table slimy with globs of her flesh. Bones poked out of her shirt in places. She was trying to say something to Danny, struggling to get the words out. Danny leaned in close, although she was afraid.
“One for you, twenty for me,” Kelley croaked, black foam spilling between her teeth.
And then her head fell off her neck.
• • •
Danny opened her eyes, and immediately closed them again.
She was in a hospital. It didn’t look like one—the room s
he was in appeared to have been part of a grade school, originally, complete with cloud-glazed green chalkboards and U.S. presidents marching around the cornice in chronological order—but she was in a hospital bed and the smell of a hospital was heavy in the air. Sickness and strong cleaning fluid, mostly. She closed her eyes as soon as she opened them because there were three people in the doorway to the room. Two men were talking in low voices to Joe Higashiyama, the doctor. The men were guards of some kind, with black military-style uniforms, blaze orange safety vests, and masses of weapons and gear. They could have been SWAT, or mercenaries of the type the government used to hire to keep overseas troop levels attractively low for voters back home. Like those guys Danny faced off against in the California desert when everything first went to hell.
None of the three had been looking in her direction, so she pretended sleep and listened to their conversation.
“Rules is rules,” one of the guards said. “One child, one adult.”
“We also have a rule that we don’t turn injured people away,” Joe said. “Until recovered.”
“We were told she just has a headache. That’s not injured.”
“Her brain is damaged,” Joe replied. “We did a CT scan and there’s subarachnoid bleeding, which corresponds with her symptoms. It could kill her. She’s well-known to a number of people here in town, and according to them, she’s taken some major hits to the head since the crisis began. Do you need to see the pictures?”
“Okay,” the second guard broke in. “So she is injured. We still only got one kid for the pair of them. So either she’s out of here or the gimp is out of here. That means we send the wheelchair on her way.”
The acoustics of Joe’s voice changed; Danny guessed he’d stepped into the hallway beyond the room. “Gentlemen,” he said, which Danny thought was probably an exaggeration. “I think we can keep them both here for a couple more nights. I need to examine the young lady in the wheelchair for skin rash, urethra lesions, and so forth—it’s extremely difficult to remain healthy in confinement like that. And this woman here isn’t going anywhere until she’s conscious, at the very least. So if we can table the discussion for at least twenty-four hours, I’ll be very grateful.”
