by Ben Tripp
“Victims?”
“The dead people. I don’t know what to call them. Wolfman said they were—”
He made a face. Didn’t want to say it. Danny almost whispered: “Zombies, I know.”
“Well it don’t seem right.”
“I been thinking of them as ‘infected,’ but that’s not much better. Here’s the thing, though. There’s a shitload more of them out there. I mean a hundred to one. I’m not sure we can hold our position in town. There doesn’t seem to be any danger, but what if it’s still contagious? What if they start to…you know, to rot? We may need to go somewhere further up the line. Forest Peak got hit pretty hard, but the wave stopped here, I think. Up the line in Big Bear or Alpine Glen, it could be a lot better.”
Troy watched the survivors examining their corral-making handiwork around the parking lot. Almost time for the roundup. Herd those dead suckers into the pen. He looked back at Danny, nodding.
“You said ‘the wave stopped here.’ That’s what it was, a wave. Meaning we’re at the high tide line.”
“Meanwhile,” Danny resumed, “get your people back to the gymnasium. See if Amy can get that woman to allow her to examine the dead husband. I’d like to know what we’re dealing with, if there’s anything she can figure out. Amy can do that.”
As Danny walked toward the back of the Sheriff’s Station to check on Maria, another piece fell into place in her working hypothesis. If Forest Peak represented the end of a theoretical Los Angeles outbreak zone, and assuming downtown L.A. was the epicenter of the disease, that meant you could probably draw a big, ragged circle around the city—beyond which there would be a vast uninfected zone, until the perimeter of the next epicenter. She needed to look at the map on the wall in the station.
Danny was sick of making half-plans that went nowhere. But there didn’t seem to be much else she could do. She couldn’t get out in front of this situation. She raised Amy on her radio.
“Have you begun the examination? Over.”
“No, out. I mean over.”
“Is the victim’s wife cooperating?”
“That’s a big negatory, sir.”
“Keep trying. Or grab another one of the infected. I want to know what we’re dealing with, over.”
“Rooty-toot,” Amy said, and the radio went silent.
Inside the Sheriff’s Station, Maria was still at the communications desk. She had a couple of candy bar wrappers and a Diet Coke at her elbow. Danny felt a pang of guilt: She wasn’t attending to her people’s needs any better than she was attending to herself. Maria should have some real food, if they could find any. “How are you doing?” Danny asked.
“Okay,” Maria said. But she didn’t sound like she meant it. “You haven’t seen a man with a mustache and a Coors T-shirt? He was wearing a denim jacket. And low-heel cowboy boots. Light brown ones, I think. Maybe your height.”
Danny smiled. “No, but you would make a good cop. Good powers of observation and recall.”
Maria smiled back, but her eyes were blurred by tears. She hitched a sigh and tapped the radio set with a pencil. “No news anywhere. The internet isn’t showing anything new. There’s still six police places on the radio that I know about. There were nine before, but now there are six. None of them know squat.” She put her hand primly over her mouth, as if squat was a rude word. Her accent suggested Spanish was her first language, so she might not be sure if it was.
“But they said everybody got up again, like here,” Maria went on. “All the living people brought their dead relatives to the hospitals and the police stations and fire stations and now there are these huge crowds of those…those muertas vivas all filling up the places. One of the policemen asked if we could come down and help them. I said I would ask you.”
Danny snorted. First responders swamped by walking corpses. She wished Forest Peak had a hospital, right about now. Danny took a look at Maria’s block-print notes on the remaining radio conversations. “What’s this one?”
“The weather station went off the air twenty minutes ago.”
“Any new messages from there?”
“The same thing over and over about the infected dead rising again, until it shut off.”
“And nothing from any of the military bands?” Danny already knew the answer would be no. Aside from the general military proscription against loose radio talk, these days all branches were using digital satellite transmissions for most communication, not radio. Digital you couldn’t listen in on. And Danny didn’t even know how many units were in-country. They routinely lied about troop levels in every theater of war. The real number of personnel on American soil was far lower than most people imagined. They were probably all crammed in C-5B Galaxy cargo planes on the way to clear the streets of Washington, D.C. So the leadership wouldn’t be troubled by unsightly dead people.
Danny placed her hand on Maria’s shoulder and suggested she take a break. Maria shook her head. What was she going to do, go for a walk? Danny could understand that. “Lemme know if you hear anything new.”
Amy examined the dead man while Weaver and Troy held him down.
The man struggled feebly like a turtle flipped over on its back. He was stretched out on one of the folding tables in the gym, the only one of the infected they’d brought inside. They had kept him in the anteroom at one end of the building, not wanting to risk spreading whatever it was into the area where people were sleeping and eating, although it might have been just as much a desire to keep somewhere in town death-free as any medical consideration. The gym had become a sort of sacred space for the living. Patrick stood a few feet away, next to the dead man’s wife by the door. She had never given anyone her name, but called the walking corpse Larry, and she insisted someone figure out what was wrong with him. As Amy had decided to perform an examination on one of the dead, he would do as well as any other. He did not recognize his wife.
Amy’s veterinary tools were mostly identical to the instruments used on humans. She’d brought a selection from the van, which was now parked by the gymnasium. All of her furry friends had escaped during the morning. She hoped Diggler was all right. He was some pig. Amy’s instruments were in a scalpel roll, not her veterinary bag, because the bag had her business name in gilt letters on the side, and she didn’t think Mrs. Larry would respond well to a veterinarian examining her husband—even if he was dead. Some people were so sensitive. Among other instruments there was the penlight for eyes, an otoscope for ears, a stethoscope, and an ultrasonic Doppler veterinary sphygmomanometer, which didn’t look anything like the human version with the inflatable cuff, but measured blood pressure just as well. She listened to Larry’s cold, spongy chest. There was plenty of sloshing around in there, but no heartbeat. And no pulse at the wrists or neck. Patrick wrote down her observations on the blank pages of a math class notebook he’d found under the bleachers.
“I’m not getting any pulse at the neck, either,” Amy said. “So no circulation, no dilation of pupils, and body temperature has remained around eighty degrees for the last twenty minutes. The, uh…remains…or the ill person, anyway,” Amy corrected herself as Mrs. Larry gave her a sharp look, “is fairly active, so that may be why the temperature has stayed constant. Muscular activity produces heat. Okay.”
The infected thing opened his mouth and a faint hiss came from the throat. Amy made an involuntary noise of disgust. “Moving right along. There seems to be some respiration, but it’s not involuntary or whatever. Autonomic I mean.”
Larry’s distraught wife broke in:
“How can you not know the right words? You’re a doctor.”
“Doctors are notoriously forgetful,” Amy explained. “Anyway, we were thinking of changing the terms around. Autonomic sounds so cold, doesn’t it?” She returned to her examination. “I’d like to take a liver core temperature but the spouse of the party probably won’t go for that…” Amy looked at Mrs. Larry, who shook her head. She’d seen enough episodes of CSI to know that’s what you
did to dead people, and her Larry was not dead.
“So,” Amy went on, “I guess then let’s do a little prick test.”
“That’s disgusting!” the nerve-wracked wife started to object.
“She means prick test with a needle,” Patrick offered.
“Don’t you hurt him,” the woman said, and covered her eyes. Amy used an ordinary sewing pin of the type used to keep the holiday bunting together.
She poked the dead man’s fingers, gave a jab to the corpse’s ankle, and tried the side of his face. No flinching at all. “No reaction to pinpricks. No sensation. Like a diabetic or something.”
The examination continued for another fifteen minutes. By the end of it, Weaver and Troy were sweating from the effort of holding the body down. There was no apparent strength in its limbs, but the arms and legs had a way of twisting around in the grip, the skin loose over the muscles, that made it extremely difficult to hang on.
And Larry never got tired; he never stopped moving.
During the exam, Weaver was initially paying close attention, studying the corpse wriggling under his hands. He could see razor stubble on the face. The skin was ash-colored, almost metallic. There were tiny dark veins under the surface that caused this appearance, he could see that much. The mouth didn’t seem to be wet, the tongue the color of day-old fried steak. The teeth looked unnaturally yellow, almost like kernels of corn, probably because the cold blue-tinged flesh made them look that way by contrast, not because they’d changed color. Patrick often delivered long sermons on how color worked. Weaver would grunt in response, although it was all actually kind of interesting. He simply didn’t feel like he was qualified to remark.
And the eyes—Weaver couldn’t look into them, although even when he made eye contact with the thing, there wasn’t any real recognition. It was as if someone had injected watered-down skim milk inside the eyeball. But the most disturbing part was the way the eyes would roam around the space, almost blindly, but then fix upon a human face and stare intently.
Weaver looked away, and found himself staring at Patrick, standing there with the notebook and pen in a strange pose with his shoulders halfway up to his ears and his knees pressed together. Weaver was worried about him. Patrick had far more strength than he himself suspected, but he was so invested in reacting to everything, so into the drama, that you couldn’t tell where the real feelings started and the theatricality ended. Then again, that was one of the things Weaver liked about him.
Weaver thought of himself as inhibited, bottled up. Patrick was practically inside-out. Right now the poor guy looked like he couldn’t decide whether to puke or faint, although at present the corpse’s wife was outmatching him in the histrionics department. Out-Hecuba Hecuba, Weaver remembered. From the Shakespeare play Hamlet. Patrick (who had designed the sets for a production of the play, not long after they first met) had explained who Hecuba was to Weaver, although Weaver promptly forgot. Patrick had a wide range of subjects he was intelligent in, including classical theater. Alan Rickman was playing Polonius in that show, and Weaver dug Rickman a lot, he remembered that, too. They shook hands at one of the after-parties. Hecuba was a lot like Larry’s wife.
It popped into Weaver’s head that gay marriage was no longer going to be the hot-button relationship issue in society. Marriages between living and dead people, like what they were witnessing now, would be the new crisis. The Catholic Church was going to have a field day with this. Was Alan Rickman still alive? Weaver cleared his mind. I’m babbling, he thought.
When Amy was done, despite the protestations of Mrs. Larry, Troy and Weaver got her husband back on his feet and pushed him outside, into the parking lot. They closed the doors as the corpse lumbered toward the living again. “You can’t do this, it’s a free country!” the woman protested.
“Dead people don’t have human rights,” Troy said, and went off to the men’s room to wash his hands. Mrs. Larry didn’t volunteer to be out there alone with her husband, Amy observed.
In the Sheriff’s Station, Danny told Maria everything was under control and went out the back way. This made Maria think everything was not under control, because it was the same thing she said when the taxi dispatching went to pieces at work. She wondered if her husband was out there, and if he was, how were they going to get through this? He was always in some kind of situation. Now he was probably dead and even then she couldn’t rely on him to behave. She swallowed her grief and rolled the radio band selector along the frequencies, searching for life. The red-haired sheriff was doing her best.
Moving down the alley, Danny felt the same flutter of panic she’d experienced the previous night when she walked toward Main Street in the dark and wondered if anyone else in the world was alive.
Right after her parents died she’d had a series of dreams like that, people leaving without telling her, finding herself lost in places like schools and hospitals, empty except for her.
Then she saw the girl with blue hair.
She was crouched between two of the cars that formed the nearest side of the barricade, her arms folded around her bony knees. She was watching the trapped infecteds jostling each other. Danny crossed to the girl and the smell of the stale bodies in the midday sun was stifling. “Which one are you looking at?” Danny asked, because the girl’s eyes were following one of the things.
“My mom,” she said, and pointed to a dumpy middle-aged woman with a perm. The dead woman stared into the middle distance, unaware of her child.
“Where did the others go?”
“To the school gym, the black guy said.”
“The fireman?”
The girl fell back into silence. Danny knew she ought to make introductions, find out the girl’s name, but she didn’t want to personalize anybody. They were generic civilians until further notice. Until, if she was honest with herself, she was sure people would stop dying. Danny glanced up and found the girl’s mother was facing them, although the dead eyes still didn’t seem to have registered the presence of the living women. Danny needed to give this girl a project, and fast. It wasn’t any good for her to fixate on a dead person, regardless of who it was. Danny said, “You have a brother, right?”
“Jimmy James.”
“I’m going to need your help. Somebody has to look out for him, and I’m too busy.”
The girl focused her eyes on Danny for the first time. She was naturally fair, with pale eyelashes and tiny, even freckles. She appeared to be assessing whether Danny was bullshitting her so she would move along, which Danny was. The girl didn’t answer, but returned to watching her mother. Danny tried again.
“Look, I’m real sorry about your mom. This situation blows for everybody. But I can’t leave you here, understand? I can’t. And in a couple of days when the rest of us are down at the rescue center in the valley and you’re all out of potato chips and these folks start to rot, I think you’re going to wish you had come with me.”
The girl looked as if Danny had slapped her face. Her eyes watered, then tears began to spill down her cheeks and her chin puckered up and she started to bawl. Danny grabbed her and held her head against her chest, and wished it was Kelley she was holding. The girl wept until Danny’s shirt was wet through. Danny felt the sting of tears she had yet to cry herself, but there was an ocean of those inside her somewhere.
Then they got moving, scrambling over the alley fence into the bushes, then along through the brush until they crossed Pine Street.
The dead were everywhere, swarming.
They seemed to be moving a little faster than before. Maybe the heat of the sun activated them, like lizards. But they also seemed to take a greater interest in the pair of living beings who were now tacking through them, back and forth, looking for the clearest path.
Danny led the blue-haired girl along behind the houses on the other side of Pine Street, then they emerged from cover into a fenced yard. The yard formed a clearing in a forest of terrible swaying bodies. Beyond it was the north end of
Main Street, and across the intersection was the gymnasium. The street and the parking lot were both crowded with the undead. Almost all of them were facing the gymnasium. Danny got Troy on the radio.
“Troy, gimme a 10–66.”
Troy answered in a low, confidential voice, slightly muffled as if he had his hand over his mouth.
“We’re okay here, we have the doors locked, the place is secure. But we’re outnumbered, as you probably noticed. And there’s a woman here flipping out because her husband is outside.”
“Is he alive?”
“No.”
“I’m across Main Street. The situation looks like it might be devolving. We need to get the survivors out of town. That big motor home, it’s not far from the door. That guy Weaver has the keys. I’m guessing it will hold thirty people, packed in pretty good. How many have you got?”
“That’s the good news,” Troy said. “A bunch of folks bugged out not five minutes ago, they took some trucks and a van and went up 144. So I got a dozen or so, and Amy just came in with five. They’re freaked out. I can understand the feeling. What’s your situation, Sheriff?”
My situation is fucked, she wanted to say. Thanks for asking. But she replied, “I have a girl here—”
“Michelle,” the blue-haired girl supplied.
“Named Michelle,” Danny continued, “and Maria back at the station. I don’t know where the Wolfman is, unless you have him.” Danny suddenly had a rough idea what to do next. “Okay, here’s what I want to do. We get everybody we can into that motor home, maybe put anybody extra onto Eugene the Treeman’s flatbed, and we bug out of here ourselves. Get on up to Big Bear. They’re going to have thousands of refugees on their hands, but with our uniforms we might be able to get some love. Any objections? Over.”
