by Ben Tripp
Danny didn’t mark any individuals or note their positions. There was nothing to note. Every damn square foot of the entire town was covered in the undead.
There was nothing to see, nothing to do until daylight came. Danny and the Silent Kid hugged their knees in the darkness and shivered, listening to the restless dead below and the ticking and creaking of the crippled structure around them. Their jackets were inadequate and wet. It was briefly warm when a nearby building caught fire and the wind shifted in their direction; Danny honestly thought they were going to die of suffocation. The smoke filled the air like stinking cotton wool and scoured their eyeballs raw. They became dizzy, coughed continuously, and the Kid puked. But at least it was warm.
Eventually the wind shifted. The reek of smoke clung to them and filled their mouths, but the air was cold and clean, scoured with snow. Once again the dominant stink was the queasy smell of decayed human flesh from below. Danny eventually thought to hold the Kid, keep him warm that way; he was fairly well-dressed but his neck and wrists were exposed. He fell asleep against her chest.
She wanted to look out the window again at the crowd of the undead. She wanted to deploy what she had left in the backpack. She wanted to climb up onto the roof and scream at the night sky. But instead she sat and waited.
22
At last there was a hint of light in the dark sky. Dawn might be a couple of hours away. Maybe less. Danny didn’t know. Her teeth chattered and she could see her breath in dim gray plumes. She tested her bitten leg and found the blood was no longer flowing. It was stiff but she could use it, at least until she got gangrene. The Kid was still alive, huddled to her chest, one of his thin arms hooked around her waist. He’d had a long night.
The zeroes below seemed to have settled down. That wasn’t unusual. They stopped moving to conserve their strength when there wasn’t any active prey nearby. There was a gusty breeze and the rumble of fires continuing to burn out of control in the town, but no other sounds. It was time to decide what to do, before they died of exposure or the landing collapsed or some hunters showed up and figured out how to scale the ruined tower. She gently slid herself out from under the Silent Kid. He seemed to be heavily asleep. Maybe, Danny thought, he was in a smoke-induced coma and he would never wake up. Lucky him.
She turned around, kneeling, her knees screaming with stiffness, and looked through the empty window frame, keeping herself as low as possible. She didn’t want to get the zeroes worked up again. Their quiet state might mean a chance of escape.
But what Danny saw struck a sheet of frozen steel right through her body, chilling her guts, her bones, her soul.
The zeroes were still down there, thousands of them. They were standing still. But they were all looking directly at her.
Every one of those scarred and misshapen skulls was turned precisely toward the window. Those with eyes were staring. Those without eyes had their heads tilted back to scent the air, the firelight glistening on their pulpy remains.
She saw there were a few so badly mutilated they continued to shuffle among the others, aimless, like decapitated chickens that didn’t know it was over yet. Exposed brains, faceless, featureless things, stumbling among the rest. But if the zero had any motor control left, it was turned toward the only prey in town.
Danny found she was shaking violently. More than cold, a species of shock had overtaken her. She’d seen this weird behavior in the zeroes once before, long ago when she fled San Francisco and the city was about to fall. It had been a suburb—San Mateo or somewhere like that, on the peninsula to the south of the city. She’d seen thousands of zeroes, all facing in the same direction like soldiers on a battlefield awaiting an order. The difference then was they’d been snapping their jaws. All of them, snapping and chomping until the noise of it sounded like marching feet.
Danny could hear the sound in her mind, that cracking of a million yellow teeth. It was a memory so vivid . . . but it wasn’t a memory. She watched the creatures below her. Some of their heads were rocking, snapping. They were doing it again. That awful clack of teeth.
The Silent Kid woke up.
“You know that old saying, ‘from bad to worse’?” Danny whispered. The Kid nodded. “This is what they were talking about.” Part of her mind was contemplating suicide in a matter-of-fact way—a grenade would take care of the two of them and there would be no more suffering.
But the train was still there at the end of town, the engine idling. The Architect hadn’t left yet; he must have known he’d won. That meant the rest of the children were still in play. This thought alone was Danny’s defense against the hideous noise coming from the swarm.
By now the things were all snapping their jaws. The ones so diseased that their heads were just masses of knobs struggled to make their teeth heard beneath the cancerous masses. Those whose faces had been blown off shook their heads up and down, the same instinct motivating them. What the hell was this? Some reptile memory from a billion years ago? Some little Easter egg hidden in the virus by a disease engineer? Was it God’s idea of a joke? Danny had seen documentaries in which the Nazis were gathered in Nuremberg or somewhere like that, a vast plaza, and half a million steel-helmeted men stood at attention while their Führer ranted from his podium, then bellowed their sieg heils. This looked like that, with the champing of teeth instead of the stiff-armed salutes. Ashes from the fires mingled with the snow and drifted down on the upturned faces. The snow didn’t melt, because the undead flesh was cold.
“I want you to know something,” Danny said to the Kid, because it was better to talk than to listen to the jaws snapping all around them. “I’m scared shitless. A lot of people think I don’t ever get scared. Probably you thought that, right?”
The Kid nodded, his big eyes wet.
“Well, I get scared like everybody else. But a lot of people can’t multitask. They get scared and that’s all they can think about is being scared. But what you gotta do is be scared with one hand and get shit done with the other one. Anyway, I’m kind of low on ideas right now, but what we need is a good idea. Then we can be scared and work on the plan at the same time. And if it’s a good plan and it works out, you get less scared because you got something to concentrate on. That’s my secret. I recommend it. But I got no ideas at the present time, so if you do, maybe now would be a good time to start talking again. We need to get those kids on that train out of here.”
The Kid shook his head. Whether he couldn’t talk or didn’t have an idea, he didn’t say.
Danny looked above them. They could see up inside the framing of the steeple, some of which had collapsed. There were two small cupola-style louvered windows up there, one of which was on the side of the main part of the church.
“Okay then,” Danny said, when the clacking started to get to her again. “I’m finding it hard to think with all that noise. What say we see about getting up on the roof? It might be easier to think up there.”
The zeroes continued their endless jaw-snapping. Sometimes the noise would happen to synchronize, the way clapping crowds at a concert would fall into unison; then it was one gigantic pair of jaws, biting the whole world. But it wouldn’t last, and then it became the undifferentiated blanket of crunching noise again.
She was about to lift the Kid up into the framing when the Architect’s voice came up through the empty window.
“Come out,” he said, and the moment he spoke, the champing teeth stopped.
A quiet deep as the winter followed. Danny’s ears were ringing with the silence.
She squinted out into the predawn darkness and the whirling snow. She sought the source of the voice in the crowd. Maybe it would still be possible to destroy that undead bastard completely.
“Come out,” the Architect said again. But amplified. The damn thing had a megaphone. Danny searched the far reaches of the square and thought she saw him: a lone zero perched atop the remains of a pickup truck. Yes, he was holding an electric bullhorn.
“Fuck you
,” Danny suggested, her voice cracked and hoarse.
“You know that you cannot survive,” the bullhorn said, in that flat, disinterested way of the undead. “You will be eaten alive or you will die of thirst. Come out.”
“Clear your zombies out and I’ll do that,” Danny replied. She doubted the thing could hear her, her voice was so ruined. But the silence was so complete it must have carried, because the zero replied:
“They will not attack you. Bring the child. The law is one child, one life.”
“Like hell I will.”
“One child, one life. Or we burn the church down.”
23
The walk out of the church taught Danny there was no limit to terror, no maximum fear. It could always get worse.
She went down first, pulling a rafter free in order to make her way hand-over-hand down to the ground level. The zeroes stood there, packed together like sides of rotten beef in a deep freeze. They didn’t part to let Danny through. She held a grenade in her teeth. If anything happened, she would grab the Kid and pull the pin. This wasn’t a fight that could be won. And while the Kid still lived, there was still a chance she could prevail.
But the zeroes honored the truce. She saw peeling black tongues rolling around in cancerous mouths, heard them snuffling the air to smell her scent. But they didn’t attack. Their fear of the thinkers was too great, or their loyalty. Whatever it was, the influence held.
Danny had never been this close to the undead without violence, except for Kelley, who somehow wasn’t the same. These were the stupid, nobody kind, the sharks. Even in the twilight of undeath, Kelley had been someone.
She pushed the grenade up the sleeve of her jacket. “It’s your choice,” Danny said to the Kid, when she was still alive after thirty seconds on the ground floor.
The Silent Kid came down. He was weeping, shaking like there was an earthquake only he could feel. But he came down. Danny put her arm around him, drew him in as tight as she could. They started walking.
Now the zeroes parted before them, a bubble of space following their progress through the crowd. Danny was limping; she had to transfer some of her weight onto the Kid. She felt insanity—real madness—clawing at her mind. It was too much to bear. Every face was more hideous than the last, every body more misshapen, the human frame twisted by devils into every imaginable distortion. The stench of burned and rotten flesh was overwhelming, and yet there were notes of decaying hair, of shit and urine, foul teeth, ruptured bellies. A thing with a translucent membrane for a head, filled with what looked like worms, touched the Silent Kid’s hair in an almost tender gesture. Everywhere there was exposed bone, seething with insects despite the cold, and entrails hung in blackened swags. Danny abruptly vomited thin bile on skeletal feet held together only by scraps of rawhide skin. The Silent Kid threw up as well, but into his hands, as if he was trying not to discomfit anybody near him. She spat on one of the zombies to clear her mouth; it moaned faintly with desire.
“Listen, Kid? You heard what the zero said. One child, one life. I know what you must be thinking: I’m handing you over to save my own ass. But I’m not. I got something in this backpack he doesn’t know about. I got one more move that might get your skinny ass out of trouble.”
The Kid didn’t respond. But he was gripping Danny’s mutilated hand in his own vomit-slick fingers, and she understood he was so frightened he would cling to her even if she attacked him herself.
“So here’s the deal. That zero up ahead, I was going to kill his enemy for him and then when he came around to congratulate me, I was going to kill him, too. And like always, I was too goddamned late. So he collected all the kids in that train. The last one is you. Then he’ll stop up at the resort and get the rest. After that he’s going to choo-choo the fuck out of here and eat you all one at a time. Right? That’s what this means. I hope I’m not upsetting you.”
The Architect was working from Adolf Hitler’s playbook, except he wasn’t using his prisoners as free labor.
This was a buffet.
Danny and the Kid were halfway through the stinking undead to the pickup truck. She could see the thinker with the bullhorn up ahead on top of the vehicle. They’d be within earshot soon. One of the things with no face stumbled across their path; the Kid made a noise of horror and pressed himself behind Danny. She let the thing stumble by. It had nothing atop its neck except an egg-cup of skull supporting what must have been the hind brain, the medulla and cerebellum. One ear still clung to a spar of bone that jutted up above the ruined flesh. It was effectively headless.
Danny felt the madness coming again, the desire to stop and be done and die. But the part of her that planned and schemed was putting things together. She thought, if this somehow wasn’t a trap, if they weren’t torn to pieces in the next couple of minutes, that she might yet save the Kid. But it would be a long shot, and there were more variables than even the worst plan ought to have.
“Listen good, okay?” she whispered. “You’ll be safe on the train, okay? For a while. I think that’s true. Maybe a couple of days or more. Not too near here. And here’s what’s going to happen. If I get out of here alive, I’m going to score some wheels and follow the train. I’m going to head it off at the pass and fuck things up.”
They were close. She could see the thinker watching them, his shattered face a bloodless mess of anatomical detail, the socket where his arm should have been catching the firelight. She dropped her voice even lower, speaking directly into the Silent Kid’s ear.
“I promise, if I am alive, I will come for you.”
Rough claws fell upon them, and there were hunters pushing through the crowd of moaners, making way, taking charge like palace guards. They were salivating freely over their leathery chins, long teeth wet.
“Do you understand?” Danny said, as the monsters pulled her away from the Kid.
“Yes,” the Silent Kid replied.
And then he was dragged out of view into the swarm.
• • •
“You killed many. You destroyed the town,” the Architect said. Danny limped beside him, every step a penance for her sins. None of this could be happening. She was among the zeroes and there was order, security, and discipline. She didn’t know it was possible. But the moaners parted well ahead of them, almost cringing, clearing the way; the hunters were like dogs, patrolling along the edges of the mob. They hissed and snarled the moaners into compliance. Danny wondered if there was some instinct for fear being awakened in the things, which otherwise seemed to fear nothing.
“They fucked up and killed themselves,” Danny said. “If you had waited another ten minutes, I would have blown up that asshole on the cross.”
“You’re not reliable, Sheriff. I eventually realized you would try to kill me, too.”
“That’s true . . . so why am I still alive?” Danny couldn’t see why the Architect hadn’t attacked her yet.
“That’s the right question. You are still alive because you have ruined my body. I want you to know what eternity feels like. From now on to the end of your little life, you are marked. No unliving creature will harm you, not the stupidest nor the most cunning.”
“Bullshit. These things will take me down the minute I’m out of sight of you.”
“You’ll see. You have upon you the mark of Cain. That’s why they didn’t kill you at the train, when everyone else was destroyed. You shall live on and on while all around you die.”
“Then why did they attack me in the church?”
“I hadn’t reached them yet.”
Danny rejected the idea. It was too elegant. Too damn clever for this gristly creature to pull off. But still, she wasn’t dead yet. It might even be true.
“Why are we talking? I don’t talk to you fuckers. If that Kid dies, if you harm him—”
“He will be safe. He will reach the destination.”
“And then?”
“And then you will spend the rest of your life wondering. I hope that you live for
ever.”
They hobbled down the street in silence. Danny’s head was flaring with pain now, a series of crescendos that threatened to expand into another blackout at any moment, but she forced her legs to move, limping heavily. There was still a single, slender chance for the Kid—and by extension, the rest of the children, too.
They reached the margin of town and the zero swarm was much thinner here. She might be able to run for it soon, although the hunters would come after her fast as wolves. But she couldn’t run at all, if she was honest about it.
“Good-bye, Sister of the Dead,” the Architect said.
“My sister was different,” Danny said, and hatred bubbled up inside her like hot coal tar. “She came back and she still had something inside her. She wasn’t just a shell like you.”
• • •
The Architect stood at the edge of a parking lot in front of what had once been the local supermarket, the last structure inside the fence. Behind it was an army of the undead, hunters first, forming a hunched, eager rank, then the mass of the swarm behind them, pressing forward, the control of the more capable zeroes barely enough to stop them rushing at the retreating prey.
Danny stood a few yards into the parking lot, blood trickling into her boot. “Find a working vehicle and leave? That’s it?”
“That is all,” the zero said. “Enjoy what’s left of your life. Everybody you know will either join us or die, but you”—here he ran out of breath and had to reinflate his lungs—“you alone, will never be eaten by our kind. You are tainted meat. All shall die or serve us, and you shall look on in despair, shunned by every kind, even your own.”
“Is that all you got?”
“No,” the Architect said, and for the first time, smiled. It looked like real pleasure, at least on the side of his mouth that wasn’t a ruptured mass of tissue. His one eye even sparkled. At that moment Danny realized he was almost more human than she was—she couldn’t feel happiness. He could.
