by Ben Tripp
“I was about to do the same fucking thing,” he said. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”
That was all the vindication Danny was going to get. She and the others bashed through the back doors of the station that led out onto the platform and ran down alongside the massive wall between station and warehouse. It was booming and vibrating with the struggling undead on the far side. The stink of them penetrated the iron plates, it seemed; the narrow space between this fortification and the rock wall at the foot of the mountain was hot and smelled like a sewer. The train was directly ahead, and as Danny ran with the others, she experienced a rush of pure relief: The children were being handed up into the boxcars by a crew of workers who hadn’t joined the combat.
“Are they through?” the foreman of the workers shouted.
“Five minutes,” Danny hollered back. Then she was among them, trying to help lift the children into the cars, but she didn’t have the right hands for the job. She dropped a screaming, snot-webbed toddler.
“Which one’s yours?” Mickey called to her. He was up in the doorway to the second car, packing the kids in as they were lifted into his arms.
“The one that doesn’t talk,” Danny said. The entire scene got brighter; she glanced over her shoulder and saw the station was now fully involved, the fire pouring like liquid through all the windows and doors and leaping up out of the cupola.
A woman leaned out of the warehouse door through which the kids were being led in weeping groups. “Are you with the quiet one? He won’t come with us!” she called.
Danny sidled through the terrified children—some of the older ones were carrying the infants, others clinging to each other as if there was a high wind blowing through. All of them were wet-faced with tears, their mouths bent in wobbly Os of despair.
Inside the warehouse it stank of the children, not of the undead. The hanging fluorescent lamps seemed alien; the whole world outside was lit by fire, and here was steady, bland light. But the walls were booming: The undead were hurling themselves at the obstruction outside. Danny saw most of the young had already been evacuated, but there were two women struggling in an area full of bunk beds. Danny headed for them.
There was the Silent Kid. He had locked his arms through the wooden upright of one of the bunks. The desperate, sweating women turned at the sound of Danny’s voice:
“I got him,” she said.
And she was right. The Kid instantly released the post and ran to her, winding his fingers into her jacket. “Get out of here, there’s no time.”
The women’s faces were masks of relief. They rushed for the back door, where the last couple of children were just then disappearing into the boxcars. Already the door of the foremost was rattling shut on its rails.
“You want to go with them,” Danny said. “Go with them, okay?”
The Silent Kid shook his head. Danny knelt in front of him, eye to eye. They were the last people in the building. The lights flickered. Power lines were probably burning.
“If you stick with me, you will be eaten by the zombies,” Danny explained, in her most reasonable voice. It came out as a harsh growl. “One hundred percent certain. You will be eaten.”
The Kid shook his head.
“Do you want to die?”
He shook his head again.
“Then you gotta go, right now.” They could hear the doors of the second boxcar clattering shut.
The Kid pointed to Danny’s pistol, now stuck in the front of her waistband, and then pointed to his temple.
“You and me, then,” Danny said. She stood up, her knees protesting, and marched over to the warehouse door. The smoke coming down the tracks was choking by now, and over the roar of the flames she could hear the moans of the undead. But the train engine was powering up, its diesel smoke mingling with that of the structure fire. Sparks rained down along with the snow. Mickey was there, walking down the short row of cars, checking everything was ready for the trip. Danny waved him over. They stood in the light of the warehouse door, lit greenish on one side and red on the other.
“Take the train up to the resort. You’ll probably meet some resistance there, but try to get the rest of the kids out of there,” Danny said. “Then go as far as the line will take you.”
“That’s the plan,” Mickey said. “I got a dozen men say they’ll fight rearguard, slow down the swarm.”
“I been saving some goodies in my pack,” Danny said. “We might be able to do some damage.”
“You’re staying? What about the kid?”
“He stays, too.”
“You’re a shitty parent,” Mickey said.
“He’s not my kid,” Danny said, and clapped Mickey on the shoulder. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Mickey gestured a half-salute and turned back to the train. Danny let her own hand fall on the Kid’s shoulder. Then she saw something strange: Mickey was almost up to the engine when he turned toward the high iron wall, his face distorted with shock; then a bulb of flesh sprang out of the back of his skull and he fell to the tracks.
The Architect stepped into view. Now Danny could see there was a door in the wall, as heavily fortified as the rest of it. The Architect had a gun in his right hand; he had no left hand. His arm was missing at the shoulder, and the upper side of his face had also been blown off. His eye socket was a black crater through which Danny could see his sinuses.
Cad Broker stepped through, and then a couple of the other infected unliving, including Lashawna from the badlands with her onionlike boils. The Architect struggled to make his lips work; much of his breath escaped through the holes in his cheek.
“I have a key.”
21
Danny reached for another hand grenade, but the Architect raised his pistol hand in a gesture of dismissal.
“You want to blow things up with all these precious children?”
Danny didn’t think the blast would get through the boxcar walls, but she hesitated.
“Anyway,” the Architect continued, “kill us and the swarm comes in. You can’t get to this door before they do. You’ve ruined my looks,” he added, when Danny didn’t reply. “You’ve spoiled my eternal life.”
“So kill me,” Danny croaked. She was all out of ideas.
“Oh, no,” the Architect said, his tattered cheeks puffing out. Danny could see a couple of his upper teeth. It reminded her of the nightmare she’d had. “I want you to live. If nobody else, you. Get her out of here,” he said, turning to Cad. Cad had escaped most of the explosion, Danny saw. He was only missing his nose, and dark red blood poured out of the wound.
“Fuck you,” Danny said, and drew her pistol.
Cad took the bullet, his forehead splitting open. Then the Architect was gone behind a mass of undead that rushed through the doorway in the wall, as if at a prearranged signal. Defenders leaped down out of the train. There was more gunfire, and screams, and Danny could hear the screaming of the children inside the boxcars. She thrust the Silent Kid between the wheels of the train and attacked the swarm.
She emptied the pistol and drew her knife and slashed at the undead until she was blinded by their black blood. She went down under their weight. But no teeth found her. None of the screams of agony, none of the crackling bones and ripping ligaments were hers. She fought until she was drowning in rotten guts, until she could not move for the weight of the dead piled atop her. She was buried alive in corpses. A diseased thing with mushroom eruptions all over its rotten flesh lay directly atop her, its mucus-drooling eyes fixed on hers, jaws hanging slack, until the light was blotted out by the bodies above. Danny struggled to roll over, to press her face into the mire.
The muffled sounds of combat and pain were already tapering off. Then there was silence except for the moaning of hungry ghouls, those that couldn’t feast on the remains of the defenders. Danny didn’t hear the shrill cries of children anymore. She heard nothing. Her ears were stuffed with dead flesh.
• • •
The blood-soake
d gravel against which Danny’s face was pressed started to vibrate. The train was moving.
The mass of dead things shifted as the car beside Danny rolled forward. No coherent thoughts penetrated her mind, but she wanted the Kid to be dead now, to die under the wheels if he hadn’t already been devoured. It was a shapeless wish.
Then she found she could move one of her feeble arms. She dragged herself forward and a rush of icy air entered the fetid tomb in which she was buried.
Danny emerged from the human ruins to find the train had simply advanced down the tracks far enough to get it away from the burning station. A hundred meters or so past the platform, which by now was a mass of red embers and black staves feeding the yellow flames. The Silent Kid stood on the opposite side of the tracks, unharmed, although several dozen of the moaners stood around him, ropes of yellow saliva dangling from their jaws.
“You’re the only living adult left in Happy Town,” the Architect said. He was standing at the back of the train, surrounded by his army of zeroes. “The children live. That’s our policy. I told you that. But they come with me. Including that one,” he said, and gestured at the Silent Kid.
“No way,” Danny tried to say, but the foul liquor of rot in her mouth made it impossible to form words. She hooked her hand at the Kid and he scrambled through the dead to her side.
“No child left behind, that’s my motto,” the Architect said.
Danny grabbed the Silent Kid’s hand and they ran for the doorway in the wall.
• • •
They ran down the main street, although Danny was so weary and her head ached so much that she lurched along hardly faster than she could normally walk. The undead all around them moaned and reached out, but whatever power the Architect had, it still held. At least until they’d made a couple of blocks from the conflagration at the tracks. Then she saw the zeroes were closing in, showing signs of their native hunger. Their master’s influence had limits. Something reached for her leg and she sidestepped it—then saw it was the half-living Nancy, her face gray, the remains of her legs trailing behind her like butchered snakes as she elbowed her way through the snow on her belly.
“Save me,” Nancy said.
Danny ignored her, shoving the Silent Kid back into motion as the undead circled closer. They were halfway to the bank building before a pack of hunters broke from the rest and began loping along behind them. By the time Danny was limping past the headless bronze soldier, the moaners had joined the chase.
The Architect was too far away. It was her and a few thousand zeroes, closing fast.
There was no way they could get out of town on foot. Everywhere there were corpses, the dead and undead alike heaped on the ground, now blanketed with snow. Danny looked around them. She had explosives—grenades in her pockets and more in her pack. She lobbed a couple of them among the hunters.
“When those blow up, run for the church,” Danny said to the Kid.
It might just have been the violence of the noise, but when the grenades exploded and threw fistfuls of hunter-zero into the sky, the Silent Kid broke and ran for the church, weaving among the zeroes that stood between him and the gutted front doors.
Rotten fingers brushed Danny’s face. She had almost passed out. Several seconds had gone by, and she was just standing there like a fool while the undead closed in. She broke into as much of a run as she could muster, following the Silent Kid, and seconds later was inside the church.
• • •
The stairs up into the steeple ended ten feet from the floor. Right away Danny saw there was a way up. One of the stringers still clung to the landing above, like a big wooden saw; everything else was gone.
“Use that thing like a ladder,” she said to the Kid, and picked up a baluster that had once been part of the stair railing. A zero was coming out of the darkness inside the church, where the firelight could not penetrate. She clubbed it down and stomped its head until the rigid skull went soft. But the Silent Kid didn’t move.
“Get the fuck up there or I swear to God I’m going to bash your fucking brains out next,” Danny elaborated. The Kid started climbing.
Danny didn’t think she was going to have time to get out of arm’s reach herself—the zeroes from inside the church were nearly upon them, although they were hampered by the tangle of broken wood and plaster underfoot. Others were coming through the outer doors. She swung the baluster at the nearest of the undead, an emaciated creature with half its scalp missing. The blow only turned its head. She thrust the baluster straight at its eyes and managed to jab one of them out, but it didn’t reach the brain. She didn’t have any strength. Scaly hands slid over her arm, found a purchase, gripped with that nerveless power the things got when prey was near. They grabbed at her backpack. They couldn’t have that.
Danny hacked the club blindly at the confluence of the grasping hands, felt them drop away, and then she sprang after the Silent Kid, who had reached the landing above. There were twenty or more of the undead now, clawing and falling over each other in their haste to reach the living flesh they craved. Danny was halfway up the stringer, balancing with her backpack pressed against the steeple wall and her boot heels on the notched lumber that had held the stairs up, when the nails at the top gave way.
She toppled and fell full-length among the undead.
Three of them collapsed when she hit. A splinter of wood penetrated the flesh of her upper arm. Danny kicked and pushed, knocking the things away, and in a matter of seconds was on her feet, but one of the things had bitten her, down low on her right leg. She didn’t know how badly.
The Silent Kid had disappeared from Danny’s field of view and she hoped he was on his way to the roof or wherever was farthest from the sheriff’s last stand.
But then a long yellow piece of pine came down, a rafter or something like it. It was studded with joist hangers, bent metal clips to hold connecting members of wood. They looked a hell of a lot like the footholds on a telephone pole. Danny didn’t look back. She hauled herself up the rafter, bony fingers scratching and clawing and pulling her back down. She remembered the woman with her leg torn apart while she hung from the roof, and kicked out. She reached the landing, and tried to pull the improvised ladder up after her. But the zeroes were grabbing it like it meant something to them, maybe hoping to follow. So Danny kicked it away instead, and it fell among them. She watched to make sure none of them were smart enough to stand the timber back up, then scrambled away from the edge of the landing and pressed her weight against the wall.
The Silent Kid was beside her, panting. The landing had about half the roof framing spilled down onto it, with some plywood and tar paper still clinging to the structure. Snow spilled down from above like handfuls of feather down. Danny wasn’t sure how long the landing would remain attached to the wall, but there wasn’t much of anyplace else to go. Above them was another flight of stairs, intact except for the railing, but above that was only the blown-out steeple, two adjoining walls and the spire, the rest fallen down.
“Stay against the wall,” she said, when she had her breath back. The undead were moaning and gasping down below, sucking in the scent of living flesh. They were climbing over each other, trying to scale the walls. The building shook with the fury of their attack.
The Silent Kid was checking himself over, now. Danny was glad to see that. He still planned to survive. Or cared what kind of condition he was in, at least. While he was checking himself over, Danny took the opportunity to steal a look at her leg.
The bite was just above her Achilles tendon. Reached the muscle. A piece of skin had been bitten away. She’d felt that during the struggle, the intense but blurry pain of compression between the jaws suddenly sharpening into razor-edged agony as flesh tore. The Silent Kid was also looking at the wound, his eyes wide and round. Whatever went on in his young mind, it had no outlet, no words.
“It’s just a zombie bite,” Danny said, and remembered she’d never been much good at reassuring children. Kelle
y could have attested to that, if things had gone differently. She tore a strip of duct tape off one of the rips in her jacket and pasted it over the injury. “Are you okay?”
The Kid nodded. His pale face was grave. The danger hadn’t passed. This was just a brief interlude. They couldn’t stay on their precarious little perch for very long, and below them were dozens of zeroes. More than dozens. The moaning was so numerous it sounded almost like ocean surf. Danny decided to have a look at their predicament and start making the new plan. There was a one-in-a-million chance they could get out of this. She’d faced worse odds.
There was a window on the landing just above their heads. The glass was broken out of it, a piece of lumber jammed clean through, and the arch at the top gave the opening a look of surprise. Danny pushed herself up the wall, and felt the throbbing injury to her leg start bleeding afresh as hydraulic pressure took over. Nothing to be done about it. She hooked an arm over the windowsill to steady herself and looked out across the dark town.
The view was ghostly in the deep falling snow. The buildings that hadn’t been damaged in the fighting and fleeing seemed normal enough, but every third or fourth structure was either smoking or shot half to pieces. Not much glass in the windows. The phone and power lines were draped limply over the rooftops and snaked around the pavement. But not much of the ground was visible, because the zeroes didn’t just sound like the ocean. They looked like it.
Danny didn’t bother to count. However many of the undead it took to fill an entire small town from one end to the other, wall to wall, shoulder to shoulder, that was the number of them. Thousands. Some were pale as cave creatures, most filth-darkened, discolored by exposure, stained or charred. Some of the things could almost be living people, except for the blood and the chunks missing. Most of them were ragged and skeletal, often naked, but there were the incongruous heavy ones, pendulous with rotten bags of fat, and some still wore garments of bright colors that resisted the filth and corruption and wrapped their decayed hosts in cheerful patterns. The miracle of polyester. The deforming disease was everywhere in all its varieties.
