by Ben Tripp
Troy didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then: “Refugees…Damn. Yeah, I’m ready to split town. We can put up a sign so whoever’s hiding in their basement around here can follow us up when they get the balls. Ah hell, 10-6, over.”
Ten-six: stand by. Danny heard some noise in the background over the radio, then the channel went silent. Seconds later, she could hear shouting, and one of the doors of the gymnasium flew open. A woman ran out, crying, “Larry! Larry, where are you?” The woman rushed into the thick of the walking dead and Danny lost sight of her. A moment later, Troy emerged. When he saw the increase in the number of the infected, he stopped moving and backed up against the building. Danny waved over the heads of the walking dead. “Troy, over here.” He waved back and pressed the radio to his face.
“Sheriff, you want me to get her or leave her? Out.”
“I got her, you keep the rest from panicking, out.” Danny turned to Michelle. “Follow me close,” she said.
They went back the way they came.
Danny pushed through the front door of the sheriff’s station into Main Street where the dead were milling around, drugged eyes following her as she bounded down the steps and into the mass of bodies. The girl Michelle stayed behind, and Danny could hear Maria speaking to her, probably glad to have someone around who was a little warmer than Danny. She could hear Larry’s woman calling for her husband in the crowd; she hadn’t found him yet, and predictably he wasn’t responding. Danny shoved her way among the repulsive things, their stink of excrement and old fish making her throat close. She had smelled terrible things in her life, foremost of all the savory stench of burning flesh, but this smell wasn’t only disgusting, it was alien. She’d never experienced anything like it before. Her stomach roiled. Then another voice joined the frantic cries of Larry’s wife.
“Danny, where the heck are you?” It was Amy.
Danny shoved through the corpses as through immense slugs, repulsed by the touch of them but unwilling to allow herself any squeamishness. Touch them and be damned. Get to Amy. It was slow going, though: The dead were more active than before, groping, clutching at her uniform, as if wanting her to stay.
They met in the street in front of the Junque Shoppe. Danny saw the reanimated highway patrolman shamble past, and behind him the now-dead mullet man with the FUCK T-shirt. Somehow his lower lip had been torn off, hanging now by a scrap of flesh at one side. His teeth showed through. Then there was Amy, emerging through the crowd behind him, trying not to touch the infected but getting squeezed anyway as they lurched into each other.
“Nice to see someone alive,” Amy said. “Have you seen another live woman in a yellow polo shirt?”
“She’s over there,” Danny said, and hooked her chin down the street. “Let’s get her. I want everybody out of town in half an hour.”
The two women moved away through the silent, shuffling crowd, Danny in the lead, Amy following with her hands up at her shoulders as if she’d seen a mouse, not a thousand reanimated corpses.
“He’s not dead!”
There was Larry’s wife, pointing accusatorily between Amy and dead Lawrence, as if she’d caught them in an affair.
“I know he’s moving, but he’s not alive. We can’t leave him in the gym.” Amy was pleading, something that never worked, in Danny’s experience.
So Danny stepped in between husband and wife. She took a deep breath. One more try. Her patience was all dried up. She took hold of the wife’s arm.
“It’s not her fault, ma’am. State regulations. Let’s get back—”
“There’s no such regulation!”
Amy took the woman’s other arm, and she and Danny began to gently propel her toward the gym. The zombies—hell, that’s what they are, Danny thought—were coming uncomfortably close to them as they argued. Others were following the survivors toward the gym, and still more were emerging from the trees, from doorways, from behind the buildings. Hundreds of them. Amy continued to reason with the woman, who was gibbering with upset, tears flowing down her cheeks.
Then she lunged forward, teeth bared, an inch from Amy’s startled face: “If he isn’t alive, why is he walking down the street? What kind of doctor are you, anyway, if you can’t tell the difference between alive and dead?”
Danny pulled the woman back, but she shook Danny off and chugged straight down the street toward her Larry, calling out his name. Danny caught Amy’s wrist: Let her go. She didn’t want a hysteric in the gymnasium anyway, if she was going to stir up the others. Just as Danny was about to suggest they start the move out of town, Danny’s radio squawked.
“There is a new message recording. I think it is urgent,” Maria said.
“Not something for the open radio?” Danny asked, speaking into her shoulder mic.
“No,” Maria said. She sounded afraid.
“We’ll be right there,” Danny said. “We’re pulling out of town, get ready to move.”
She didn’t care where they went, as long as it was free of dead people. Then Patrick and Weaver appeared behind them.
“We’re here to help with the crazy lady,” Patrick said, and Weaver grunted.
“Forget about her,” Danny said.
They skirted their way toward the Sheriff’s Station, keeping well away from the ever-increasing number of zombies. Danny had now lost two living people to the confusion, by her reckoning: Larry’s wife, and Wulf. The old man had melted into the scenery at least a couple of hours back, in that polecat way of his. Danny had no idea where he was. They passed Mrs. Larry, now with her arms thrown around the neck of her husband’s stumbling corpse, her head pressed to his chest and his unbeating heart. Danny observed the zombies were starting to move a little faster.
“It’s like the death is wearing off,” Amy said, reflecting Danny’s thoughts. “They seem to be speeding up.”
They stepped inside the station and locked the door.
“Listen.” Maria was crying. She twisted the volume knob on the radio. It was the synthesized voice again, programmed by some anonymous soul out there at a communications station somewhere:
“—Eat living flesh. Repeat: The dead eat living flesh. Repeat: The dead eat living flesh. Repeat: The dead eat—”
Danny reached out and snapped the volume down. Weaver scratched the back of his neck as if trying to think out a chess problem. Then an ancient voice grated out: “I told you and told you. We gotta smash ’em in the head.”
It was Wulf. He must have come around the back way, the alley being free at present of zombies except for those still trapped in Troy’s corral. Now he was sitting back inside his cell with the door open, stuffing a backpack with foraged supplies.
“I’m not staying,” he said. “This here is the only safe place in town, but not for long.”
Maria gripped Danny’s wrist. “What do we do about this message? Is it true?”
Danny scratched her neck in the same way Weaver had. The engine of her mind was racing, but she couldn’t get it in gear. This new information was too much. If the message was even possible, if it was true—
A shrill scream rippled through the air from out on Main Street.
8
Danny rushed through the station door, then stopped in her tracks on the step.
The dead shuffled past, some stopping to look at her like she was an animal escaped from its cage. A mass of bodies from one side of the street to the other.
Mrs. Larry was holding her right hand against her chest and pressing it with her left, but she couldn’t stanch the blood streaming through her fingers. She was standing a few feet from Larry himself, down whose chin a quantity of blood had spilled.
He was chewing.
Zombie.
Danny clattered down the station steps, followed by Weaver. Danny’s gun was aimed at Larry, but she tried to keep aware of the other zombies drawing closer to them. In the few minutes since they’d left the street, the number of them appeared to have doubled.
Like the crows, she t
hought.
Vividly, from nowhere, Danny remembered a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the one with the seagulls. And the crows. The scene she remembered had crows. The blonde was outside a school, having a smoke. There was a crow on the jungle gym. Puff. Then there was another crow. Puff. And a few more after that. And by the end of the cigarette, the blonde looked up, and there were two hundred crows sitting on the jungle gym, ready to attack. Scared the shit out of Danny, age eight, when she saw it with her father. Kelley never got the chance to watch movies with him.
“Step away from it,” Danny said, her voice tight as a tripwire. Mrs. Larry didn’t move, so Weaver took a chance, moved past Danny, and got right up under Larry’s nose to pull the bleeding woman out of range.
Dead, chewing Larry took a couple of steps after them.
Danny thumbed back the hammer of the revolver, took two-handed aim.
Mrs. Larry struggled out of Weaver’s grip, leaving a crimson smear across his shirt. She ran straight back to her husband and planted herself in front of him. Danny couldn’t fire.
“What happened, ma’am.” Danny said. Maybe she could talk her away from the thing that had bitten her.
“It’s only a scratch. An accident. There’s no need to shove your gun in his face, you fascist!”
Weaver circled around closer to the woman, but there were two other zombies—a teenaged male and a short white-haired woman—taking exceptional interest in him. Weaver had seen the same movies as Wulf. It did not escape him that these things might sense the blood. My God, he thought. Man-eating zombies. I shoulda taken notes.
Up on the steps, Patrick was hunkered behind Wulf, and Amy couldn’t get past either of them. Wulf was holding a steel office chair out in front of him, legs first.
“Amy,” Danny said, “we’re going to get this individual back inside and I want you to be ready with the first aid, okay?”
Mrs. Larry fairly hissed at Danny. “I’m not—”
Just then Larry lunged, jaws gaping, and sank his teeth into her neck. Danny saw the flesh compress, his teeth too blunt to slice—but the human jaw can produce two thousand pounds of crushing pressure. Her face registered agony, then the woman’s skin broke, snapping back away from the wound, and the tissue beneath was not as resilient. The zombie’s yellow teeth sheared through the big muscle under the ear, dug deep into a dense network of glands and vessels, and met around the thumb-sized artery below.
Mrs. Larry screamed as her husband twisted his head. A jet of blood spurted ten feet in the air from the crater in her throat as he tore out a fist-sized chunk of meat. Danny could see the end of the artery: The blood looked like long red scarves shooting from it, some kind of magician’s trick. Then the blood came raining down, spattering the faces of the dozen nearest zombies.
Danny saw everything that followed with the perfect clarity of adrenaline, almost in slow motion. Those dull, dead faces felt the blood upon them, and its effect was galvanic. They became alert. The eyes were milky but active. And their mouths changed. The slack lips pulled back, exposing teeth.
Before the third jet of blood had spewed into the sky, Danny heard a sound that would never leave her again, a sound as primal as the howl of wolves.
The zombies moaned.
First the bloodied ones, then more and more until it was like the wind in the trees, a sobbing, mournful wail. It was a call stained with yearning and loss and desire, the davening of the dead.
Yet it was none of those things. In truth, it was only the call to the feast.
Mrs. Larry hit the pavement and the moaning creatures surged forward. From all sides, reaching for the living with writhing fingers, they lurched to the kill.
Danny fired a single shot through Larry’s jaw as his wife slumped down him, clutching at his belt. The bullet slammed his head back and his wife’s flesh was dislodged from his mouth. He stumbled backward, stiff-legged. Behind Danny, Wulf said, matter-of-factly:
“Headshot.”
Danny squeezed the trigger and blew the top of Larry’s head off. A mass of sepia-dark brain spat from the skull. He collapsed on his wife. Weaver darted in to shove the twice-dead thing off the woman, but she was so wet with her own gore that he couldn’t get a grip to drag her toward the station. The short white-haired zombie was fumbling at his back, jaws stretched open.
“Weaver, don’t move,” Danny said.
The pistol cracked and dark stew vomited from the white hair and the old woman flew backward. Zombies bleed black, the impartial voice inside Danny’s head observed, as if watching events on television.
“Behind you, Sheriff,” Wulf said.
Danny turned, keeping her weapon level, and fired it into the open mouth of a zombie that was barely arm’s length away. In her hyperaware state, she saw the inside of its mouth light up with the muzzle flash. There was a kick of brick dust on the building façade behind the creature as the bullet passed through its head and ricocheted away. Danny turned back to Weaver, who was trying to pull the injured woman along by the collar of her shirt. Several zombies were falling to their knees around the bloody victim, clawing for purchase on the prey.
The calculus of survival was clear. “Leave her,” Danny said.
Weaver looked back at her with disbelief, and so saw that he was surrounded. His face registered confusion. Danny knew the look, had seen it in combat: He was caught between action and reaction.
“Leave her,” she repeated, but Weaver only shoved the nearest zombie away and reached for the bleeding woman again. Danny stepped forward to pull Weaver out of the fray, knowing that she was making the same mistake he was: throwing one life after another.
“Weaver! Get over here now!” Patrick shouted, and Weaver snapped out of his trance. He got his legs under him and shoved for an opening between a couple of the shambling things, but they collapsed onto him.
Weaver twisted and kicked and threw his fists, blindly trying to keep the teeth away. But he was fighting against bodies that might as well have been made of clay. They had no speed, no nerves—only implacable purpose, their dark mouths yawning toward him.
Danny grabbed the uppermost of them and shoved with all her strength. It seemed to turn halfway around inside its skin, like a fighting dog. But it fell against the legs of another one, which toppled without any attempt to break its fall, face splatting richly on the pavement.
In the struggle, Danny lost her gun. It skidded away past Weaver. On his back, he hitched his feet up under the second zombie and kicked it away from himself. It toppled across the others that were tearing Larry’s wife apart. She was still alive, legs churning. Weaver rolled and fell on his elbows. Danny felt cold fingers skidding across her spine, then a crushing weight, and she knew there were jaws coming at her from behind to rip her skin. The thing reeked of aftershave. She thrust herself away and the zombie fell to its knees, teeth snapping. There was another one coming at her with the speed of a living man—
It was Wulf. He brought the office chair down on the head of the nearest zombie, parting the vertebrae in its neck. The head sagged across the thing’s shoulder and swung down on its chest and the zombie staggered sideways and fell. Danny recognized Sy Crocker, still in his George Washington costume. Wulf threw the chair indiscriminately into the advancing horde, scooped up Danny’s pistol, and aimed it straight at her.
This was more than Danny could respond to. She was at that place where you died simply because a better idea didn’t occur to you.
The gun barked, and Danny saw the pale pink core of the flame spit from the muzzle, something she’d never seen before. She felt the heat of the explosion. Liquid squirted into her face, and another zombie—one she had not known was there—collapsed against her arm, its teeth bared. The teeth skated over the fabric of her sleeve. Filth spilled from a hole in its temple. It fell and stayed down.
Fresh adrenaline blasted into Danny’s nervous system. Her limbs felt like clouds of electricity. She grabbed Weaver’s hand. They both scrambled to their fee
t, shoving straight-armed against the undead things that were coming at them. Patrick was now screaming at the top of his lungs, and Amy was shouting instructions that Danny couldn’t understand.
Wulf struck one of the things across the nose with the revolver, then shot it point-blank. The kick of the discharge against the skull knocked the gun out of Wulf’s hand. Danny saw one of the undead grab Wulf by the sleeve of his foul fatigue jacket. Its eyes glittered with something like desire as it stretched its neck to bite.
Wulf reached up under the jacket at the small of his back and his hand came out clutching a combat knife, one of the old-style ones with a grip made of stacked leather washers. He caught the creature by the hair and shoved the knife into its eye socket, all the way to the hilt, and twisted the blade as if opening a lock. The zombie went limp. Wulf wiped the blade on his sleeve and hopped over to Danny and Weaver.
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
It sounded like a good idea to Danny. Without any particular method, the three of them charged toward the station doors, pushing and kicking, and Patrick and Amy were on the steps blocking the doorway in their eagerness to pull their friends inside. “Get the fuck out of the way,” Danny barked, and in seconds they were all sprawling inside the station.
Patrick grabbed Weaver and embraced him, then recoiled as he realized Weaver was soaked in organic fluids: blood and the brown-black ichor of the zombies. “Are you bleeding?” he said to Weaver.
“Everybody’s doing it,” Weaver replied, and a high, strained laugh escaped him, as if this was the wittiest remark he’d ever made. As Danny locked the station door behind them, she could see a dozen of the things coming up the steps, uncertain of how to ascend.
They were having to learn how to move again. Zombies. The word still slammed against the gates of Danny’s mind. But that’s what they were. If they were this dangerous now, in the infancy of their new existence, how much worse would it get? How clever could they become? How did this begin, and how was it going to end?
