by Ben Tripp
Deputy Ted held his position, rifle pointed downhill but not at anyone specific. He stayed there until a knot of runners smashed into the Vic, rocking it on its shocks, and several of them clawed their way over the hood. When Ted tried to shove them off it, they swarmed over him and he went down heavily beneath the churning limbs. Danny’s instincts kicked in and she fired the shotgun into the air. A few of the faces behind their steering wheels ducked, but nobody in the scrum paid any attention at all. It was as if they’d gone crazy. And then it occurred to Danny that maybe they had gone crazy, maybe they’d been exposed to a nerve gas that made them run until their hearts failed. She thought of the woman with her mangled legs crawling away between the cars.
Ted emerged from the crowd, bleeding from the nose. He looked up at Danny and she reached down to pull him up, but there was nobody home inside his head. His mouth fell open and he screamed like the others, then bolted away into the crowd of runners with his hands thrown out in front of him. The Explorer rocked on its shock absorbers as a big man slammed into the driver’s side door and flopped to the asphalt with his head twisted around. Danny almost fell. The ground trembled with the pounding of human feet. There was a solid mass of people swarming past now, like a marathon, and with these numbers the Explorer might even end up overturned, parked across lanes as it was. But it wasn’t the runners that she needed to worry about.
Above the screaming and the arrhythmic thump of bodies hitting metal, she heard the sharp, blatting roar of an illegally muffled exhaust stack, then a cloud of black smoke leaped up from among the northbound vehicles. A huge jacked-up Toyota pickup with vertical exhaust pipes, a winch, and tires like millwheels lurched out of lanes and ground its way up the shoulder, scraping against lesser cars, peeling off side mirrors. There was a rebel flag decal in the back window of the primer-brown cab. Maybe Danny was going to have to shoot someone after all. But a shotgun wasn’t worth shit against an angled safety-glass windshield. Not the first round, anyway.
She kept one eye on the screaming mass of bodies rushing below her and one eye on the Toyota. He wouldn’t be able to make it past the Buick, she estimated. She was mistaken. The Toyota belched smoke, the bark of the exhausts as loud as the shotgun—and the silhouette at the wheel floored the accelerator. The truck rose up on its quad shocks and plowed through a mess of running figures, even as Danny brought the shotgun around. There was no aim. Runners were hammering full-body against the Explorer, causing it to sway and bounce.
Someone’s face made a crimson rosette on the Toyota’s matte brown hood as it bounced off the panel, then the truck T-boned the Buick, shoving it sideways across the pavement. The driver’s side door collapsed as the truck bit deep into it. Danny saw the airbags fill up the passenger compartment, then deflate, and then the Buick was obscured because it was slamming into the Explorer, crushing bodies against it so that grape-sized globs of blood and tissue spewed out. Screams became banshee howls. Danny got a bead on the truck at last. She fired the shotgun and a giant snowflake appeared on the Toyota’s windshield.
The Explorer lurched beneath her, two feet, four feet back, and her hat flew off—Danny was on her belly sliding along the roof, squeezing the trigger again, but the pellets flew wild, off into the trees on the uphill slope. Then the Explorer was mashed up against the guardrail and tipping over it in a cloud of sooty exhaust, the Toyota climbing the hood like some kind of imbecile metal-eating beast. Danny wanted to leap onto the hood and punch the driver in the face, the red meaty reverse-baseball-cap-wearing face she glimpsed behind the shattered windshield—
But Danny wasn’t on the roof anymore, she was flying, her guts turned to feathers inside her as she tumbled, and now trees were going past her, and the Explorer, with its bubble lights still flashing red, white, and blue (patriotic, the voice said), was looming end-over-end above her. There was a shower of sparks, followed by a message that said pain, but Danny never got it. The last thing she saw was the Forest Peak Sheriff’s Department medallion stenciled on the door of the Explorer, coming at her from above, upside-down.
Danny was posing for a picture with a couple of gap-toothed Iraqi kids. They wore grimy shirts much too big for them so you couldn’t see their shorts, only their skinny brown legs. Both of the boys were holding plastic bottles of water given to them by Harlan. Danny was holding her rifle across her body, away from the kids.
Then she was watching a camel spider crawl away from its tormentor, a herring-bellied puppy they weren’t supposed to have on base. The spider was all jaws, but too heavy for its own good. It didn’t have the speed it needed to get away from the puppy. Danny was nauseated by the sight of the spider, a pale, corpse-colored thing with crablike limbs and those immense jaws, a pair of razor hooks so big that its eyes were mounted at the root of them.
The woman in black from head to toe stood next to the burning farmhouse. Danny walked toward her as casually as she could manage, as if it was just another day in the life of the occupying army. Which it was. But there was no such thing as just another day. Only another day survived. Danny could see the horizon rippling like water in the heat from the structure fire, and the same shivering heat coming off the exhaust grilles on the tanks idling not far from the woman. Then the woman was moving. Moving toward the foremost tank. Danny saw that her arms were folded protectively around her belly, as if she was cradling a child. But it wasn’t a child. Danny began to run, her boots slipping against the grit of the yard. Hands wet on the shotgun. She began to run, not knowing—
It was fully dark, but there was a moon riding over the mountaintop. She was up against a tree root, and a few yards away the Explorer with the Forest Peak Sheriff’s Department medallion stenciled on the door was upside-down against a tree at the base of the retaining wall below Route 144. It was quiet up above on the road. As the initial blast of pain dialed back to a loud throb, details of her situation were coming back to Danny. Confusion and pain made her mind ripple like the heat from the burning farmhouse.
She had been on the roof of the Explorer with a gun. Where was the gun? Somewhere around. Never lose track of a weapon. She groped for the four-cell flashlight on her belt. Didn’t carry the preferred eight-cell because it pulled her pants down. Her fingers were unresponsive but she got the light on and shone it around. Carpet of rusty tree needles. No shotgun. The Explorer totaled. Blood all over it. The town council was going to love that. There was a plowed path through the tree litter that showed why she hadn’t been crushed underneath the big Ford: She had kept on sliding after she hit the ground. Fetched up against this root. See? Detective abilities working fine. Body found some yards from scene of accident, ejected from roof of vehicle. Clear as day, Your Honor. But Danny couldn’t for the life of her imagine why she’d been holding a gun on the roof of the Explorer. Good way to get shot by a sniper.
A small hatchback was over the side some distance away through the trees. Nobody hanging out of the windows. Good. There was another vehicle at the end of the flashlight’s power to reveal, hanging halfway over the guardrail. What the hell had been going on? She was on the roof of the Explorer, she knew that much. Everything else was gone from her mind. Danny was still in the position she’d awakened in, lying on her back. Time to get up and find out what she had missed.
There were fireworks lighting up the night after all—inside her skull. Danny must have hit her head on the root pretty good. She felt a massive knob on her skull that hadn’t been there before. It was wet. Fingers in the flashlight beam: yes, blood. Awesome. Was she concussed? What was the approved procedure for concussion? She didn’t recall, but she knew it wasn’t climbing up a man-made stone wall fifteen feet high. However, that’s where the road was. Unless she wanted to hike over to the logging road. But Danny wasn’t feeling entirely certain she could find the way without getting lost, and if she’d been on the roof of her vehicle the reason would be right up above. She needed to see.
She didn’t end up climbing the wall. Her sense of balance was no
where to be found. Instead, Danny groped her way along the dry-laid stone, keeping herself steady against it. There was a loud bagpipelike droning in her ears that never stopped. The ground sloped up toward town, so she eventually reached a point she could climb over on her hands and knees. Then she inspected the situation up on the road. It all started to come back as she swept the flashlight back and forth over the frozen scene of chaos around her. Danny was glad she wasn’t standing up, or she might have fallen down. The droning noise in her ears was deafening.
There were cars everywhere, cars and trucks and motorcycles and rubbish like foam party coolers and sweatshirts and McDonald’s sacks and broken glass. Accidents had stopped in midcourse: vehicles with bumpers tangled together, front ends pushed up on trunks, motorcycles spilled under the wheels. But the vehicles weren’t the main thing. That would be the blood. There was blood everywhere. And dead people. Heaps of them. Danny’s mind was reeling as she swallowed these huge chunks of information. Danny remembered all the people running. She couldn’t remember why. There weren’t many children among the dead here, probably because children simply couldn’t run as far before they fell down dead.
She made her way to her feet and approached the nearest car, a station wagon. Shone the flashlight inside. Nobody there. In the next car she could see the outline of a driver, head tipped forward against the steering wheel. And there was the Toyota truck with the giant tires. Danny struggled to remember why it angered her, then she remembered it had something to do with the upside-down Explorer. This was as much deduction as anything else; the truck was climbed up onto the bent-over guardrail right about where the Explorer went down. She approached the truck on unsteady legs, stepping over dead limbs sprawled on the pavement.
The Toyota driver was slumped against the B pillar, wedged between the door and the seat. Somebody had shot him through the windshield. Lucky shot. Not much penetration on those angled safety-glass windshields. A lot of people had died in their vehicles, but not from gunshot wounds. Danny’s light found them in almost every other car, usually slumped forward or flopped across the backseats. Then Danny realized the loud droning sound she heard in her ears wasn’t from the blow to the head. It was the sound of thousands of dead people slumped against the horn buttons on their steering wheels. If the horns were still going, that meant it could only be a few hours since Danny lost consciousness. Otherwise the batteries would have died. But it had been afternoon, last Danny could remember. Maybe around five o’clock. She’d been out of commission for at least five hours…Why she was alive when so many others were dead, Danny could not imagine. But she was not grateful for it. It was high time she got back to Forest Peak and found out what the hell she’d missed.
6
By the time Danny made it halfway to town, she was pretty sure she was the only living human being left on earth. The dead lay three deep on the roadway. Not far from the beginning of Main Street, she saw the tan shirt and brown pants of a deputy among the corpses littering the road. She turned him over with her toe. It was Deputy Dave. His face was slack, one eye wide open, the other half-closed. He hadn’t made it far before he died, unlike some of the other victims.
If this thing was a disease, Danny thought, maybe she shouldn’t be touching the corpses. Or be anywhere near them. But she wasn’t up to a hike through the woods. And if she wasn’t dead yet, the worst was probably over. Danny passed the first couple of houses in town without seeing them, dark and silent under the trees. No auto horns blaring in town. Maybe nobody had died in their cars here. Maybe someone had moved the corpses off the steering wheels.
Danny passed the first commercial building in town, the one with the real estate office and the VFW she’d never been into, although she was eligible. The whole place was dark, even the apartments upstairs. The street lights were working, so it wasn’t a blackout. Nobody had turned on the lights. All the way down the street there was darkness in the windows, except for a couple of shops and the gymnasium way down at the far end: Danny could see the side door was open, a rectangle of greenish fluorescent light.
Beneath the street lights there were more cars parked helter-skelter or abandoned where they stood, doors hanging open. And on the ground, everywhere she looked, more bodies. They lay under the lights and in the shadows, most of them face-down, most of them with their heads pointed to the north. They had died running. Danny switched off her flashlight and thought her boots had never sounded so loud on Main Street.
She was too late. She wondered what she could have done differently. It seemed to Danny these people were dead because of her, on some level—and not a level very far below the surface. If she had taken the Eisenmann thing seriously, or come up with a better plan of her own, could some of this disaster have been averted? These thoughts she stowed away in a compartment in her mind. Forget them for now. Maybe forever, if she was lucky.
She saw smoke billowing from the top of the doorway of the Wooden Spoon. The last thing this town needed was a structure fire. Danny climbed up on the hood of a car and crossed from one vehicle to the next to avoid the heaps of corpses, then jumped down in front of the café. Her bruised leg almost gave out, but she propped herself against the doorway until the pain dulled down.
It was dark inside the Wooden Spoon except for the exit sign at the back and the television over the counter, blank and glowing. There was an almost-delicious smell coming from the galley kitchen, but there was something else with it, too, that reminded Danny of something she would rather forget. She stepped over what looked like an entire family that had died on the threshold. More bodies under tables. There was a dead man slumped over the counter, arms flung forward. Danny moved to the counter and found Betty at her feet, the big woman’s face a mask of shock, a weird parody of the smiley face on her plastic nametag. The smoke was coming from behind the counter, where the cook, Mitchell Woodie, had collapsed on the grill.
Danny didn’t want to get any nearer the source of the cooking-flesh smell—or the hissing sound. Her stomach was leaping already, and her back prickled intolerably. But she couldn’t leave Mitchell there. She went around behind the counter, stepping over a number-ten can of jalapeños that had spilled on the floor. The stench of pickled peppers, burning meat, and scorched hair and fabric sent stinging bile into Danny’s throat, but she reached out and pulled hard on Mitchell’s apron strings. He was stuck firmly to the grill. Danny’s reason caught up with her gut reaction, and she realized the first thing to do was turn off the heat. This meant reaching around Mitchell, which meant she could see his face: It was blackened, with rivulets of melted fat running out and sizzling on the steel plate of the grill. His hair was reduced to tightly curled fluff. The eye nearest the heat was a hard, red knuckle protruding from blistered eyelids.
With profound misgivings, Danny reached down and tugged the spatula from the dead man’s hand. Then she grasped his shoulder, which was hot to the touch, and started scraping his face off the stove. It took something like thirty hard strokes before the weight of the body pulled the remaining skin away, and Mitchell flopped heavily to the floor. When his charred, smoking face hit the pepper juice, a puff of steam rose up into Danny’s nostrils and she had to run outside. She vomited on the curb in a small space not occupied by corpses. For a long minute she stood there with her head down, a headache pounding behind her eyes, watching a long string of bile stretch from her lip to the ground. Tears leaked from her eyes. What a crappy evening, all told. Then she forced herself to get moving again.
Danny crossed to the Sheriff’s Station, where there was faint light from inside. She stepped over a woman and two kids sprawling down the front steps. Several corpses in the dark front room. There was a light in the back, the partition door standing open, another couple of strangers dead on the floor in there. Danny wondered if Amy had run, or if she had held her post. If she was lying under the communications desk where the single light was burning. Something was under the desk. There wasn’t any reason Danny could come up with to sugg
est Amy should be alive, when so many others had died. Danny moved through her silent domain past the corpses, stopped breathing, and looked under the desk. It was the chair overturned beneath it. Amy wasn’t there, but she could be anywhere, growing cold on the ground with the blood settling into the lowest parts of her body, stiff in death.
Danny drew a long, stuttering breath. The voice in her head was working overtime: She could remember the first runner now, a woman. Maybe she should have fired the shotgun at that woman, scared some sense into the rest of the runners. But it was impossible. And it wouldn’t have worked. There were too many of them. Thousands. And these people were crazy, running like maniacs. Maybe it was one of the symptoms or side effects. They wouldn’t have stopped even if she shot every second one.
Then again, she could have formed a defensive line with some vehicles, created a physical barrier. Or even set some fires across the road. There were all kinds of ways to shape panicked people’s behavior, and Route 144 was a natural bottleneck. If only there had been time to think.
Now that there was time, though, beating herself up wasn’t going to help. If she was alive, other people were alive. She had to find them, organize them, and see about cutting any further losses. Then take a little rest. Her head hurt. And her leg. And the scars were prickling. Danny looked around at the station, probably the only living member of her force, and tried not to feel the grief and remorse that were coming at her out of the shadows. It was so quiet she could hear the ticking clock on the wall.
And then a voice like crushed gravel came from the darkness:
“Lemme out.”
It was Wulf Gunnar, forgotten in the back cell. Danny jumped, but controlled the reflex to go for her gun. Wulf saw it, though.
