by Ben Tripp
Beyond the things struggling to negotiate the steps, Danny glimpsed twenty or more of them falling upon Larry’s wife. She was dead.
Danny shoved everybody through the partition to the back room. She didn’t know if the back door was unlocked or if any of the windows were open but it was sure as hell time to secure the building. Her legs were already turning to jelly. The problem with sudden, massive infusions of adrenaline is the letdown afterward. Merely to return to normal would be bad enough; adrenaline was essentially Superman juice. But you didn’t return to normal. You crashed, and your hands shook and your legs went useless and you often enough puked for half an hour. Danny had spent plenty of time like that after bad patrols. They didn’t have time for symptoms, not now. Danny kept moving, hoping her body wouldn’t let her down just yet. The things outside might not need rest. Danny couldn’t guess. But she was nearing the limits of her own endurance.
The things hammered on the glass wall of the station with their fists. They were moaning. Danny kept everyone out of sight in the back room, keeping watch herself by peeking through the posters taped to the partition glass inside the waiting area. Her mind was in chaos. Her limbs felt like balloons.
Maria had gone around closing all the blinds in the station. Danny followed Maria, rechecking the locks, trying to get her sizzling nervous system to flatten out. She saw Patrick take Weaver into the men’s restroom, where he tried to scour the blood off him with granular pink soap powder and paper towels. Weaver was stomping around yelling about “The fucking zombies, man, this is it.” Amy headed Danny off at the doorway between the two rooms of the station.
“Danny? I need to check you for injuries,” Amy said.
“Of course I’m injured,” Danny snapped. “You should see my back.”
“I mean if you got bitten, you could get infected,” Amy said, and Danny shivered. She thought of camel spiders and scorpions and rancid infections from wading through hot sewage on patrol in Baghdad.
For now, the zombies didn’t look like they could get through the shatterproof glass of the wall. The place was secure for at least a few minutes. Danny saw bloody hand prints on the glass and realized that even the zombies that had been devouring the woman were distracted by fresh prey. They like it bleeding, Danny thought, tucking the data away for later use. A fresh kill doesn’t buy you much time.
Danny crouch-walked behind the partition counter and ducked into the back room. Amy’s hands flew over her skin, her eyes searching for bites. She roughly turned Danny around and checked her back, her arms. Then she breathed out, and Danny realized they had both been more or less holding their breath since they got inside the station. “You look okay,” Amy said. “Remember, I got bitten by Tucker Pease in second grade? It was a big deal. This is probably worse. Don’t get bitten.”
“New rule: Nobody get bitten,” Danny said to the room at large.
Wulf stormed up to her, waving his arms. His face was veined and purple with anger, beard bristling. “I ain’t gonna die unarmed, Sheriff,” he said.
“You have that knife,” Danny replied. “Guess I should have searched you better, but you were so drunk it didn’t seem decent.”
Wulf spat on the floor. “Knife, hell.” But he sat heavily on the nearest desk and started gnawing one of his black-rimmed fingernails. Danny thought to tell him to keep his hands out of his mouth until he washed the zombie blood off them, but she said nothing. Any zombie that bit Wulf would die of bellyache. If she was going to choose her team for surviving a zombie apocalypse, it probably wouldn’t include a paranoid old homeless guy, a veterinarian (not even Amy), or a couple of Hollywood pretty boys. Then again, it probably wouldn’t include an alcoholic sheriff, either. Christ, she needed a drink. A whole row of drinks. There was a thirst on her that she was going to have to satisfy at the earliest possible opportunity.
To distract herself, she checked in with Troy by radio.
“I heard some yelling,” he said.
“That was down here,” Danny replied. “The dead have got a new thing going on.”
“They learned how to dance?”
“They attacked and killed somebody.”
Troy was silent for so long Danny was about to ask if he was still on the radio. But as she opened her mouth, he spoke.
“Killed? Like Night of the Living—”
“Just like that.”
“Sheriff, if I didn’t know you for a completely humorless individual…”
Danny cut him off. “No time to talk you into it. Double-check every door in that place, make sure they’re all locked, and don’t let any of the civilians make a run for it,” she said. “We’re on a raft in an ocean of sharks. I’ll tell you the plan soon as we have one, okay? Out.”
“Good luck with that,” Troy said, and signed off. Danny felt like going to sleep, her eyelids dragging. That was the adrenaline wearing off. She yawned, and she kept on yawning as she listened to the moaning and scratching at the glass of the station.
Patrick got Weaver mostly cleaned up, although now they were both soaking wet and smelled like cheap perfume, due to the soap. Weaver had a scratch on his wrist but no apparent bites. The scratch didn’t look too bad but it would need watching. The Cutter woman had dressed it expertly with some kind of ointment and a bandage from the station’s duffel bag first-aid kit. That thing had it all: There was even a portable defibrillator in there. Patrick found its presence comforting, as well as the veterinarian’s observation (mostly to herself, he thought) that there wasn’t any difference between people and animals except fur and buttocks, and you could find humans with the former and without the latter. She was nuts, but funny.
He studied Weaver’s face. Pale under the tan. Those creases around the eyes that came and went with his smile hadn’t gone away. He looked downright wrinkled. The sheriff, too. She was exhausted. Yawning, despite everything. It was contagious—Patrick also yawned.
It was five o’clock. The second day of the crisis was flying past. The summer sun had another few hours to move across the sky before it went behind the mountain, and another hour after that before it sank below the horizon in the flatlands. Darkness was coming, a darkness infected with nightmare.
Danny and Troy stayed in contact by radio, but there wasn’t much to do except hope the zombies didn’t figure out how to jimmy a lock. All of the known living were accounted for, and anyone who hadn’t emerged yet was in for a nasty shock. There wasn’t anything Danny could do about that, either. Larry’s wife was a red scarecrow sprawled out in front of the station, one zombie still picking at the remains; the rest seemed to have lost interest. What was left of her corpse was still recognizable, blonde hair matted to her bitten face.
The dead had settled down again after the attack, and appeared to have forgotten there were living people inside the station and the gymnasium. Danny watched Main Street from the concealment of the partition, and over the course of the last half-hour, several of the zombies had actually lain down on the ground. She couldn’t tell if they had died again, or if they were sleeping, or possibly even playing possum. Subtle tricks didn’t seem to be the way of the things, but then again, they were full of surprises. One or two had fallen like puppets with their strings cut, and Danny suspected those were truly dead—done for good. Maybe the disease didn’t take with all of them. Maybe it would wear off. That was a beautiful thought. Maybe tomorrow morning they would all just stay dead and Danny would only have lost one of her flock to the undead wolves. Maybe not.
But Danny wasn’t going to wait for dark before taking action. It was the gymnasium she was worried about. The place must have had ten sets of double doors, and they were designed to stop a couple of teenagers getting in, not a thousand zombies. The sheer weight of the things could break a set of doors open, and then there was really nowhere to run. The gym was a big, rectangular box with a foyer and bathrooms. She’d spoken to Troy about this, wording her remarks very carefully in case one of Troy’s group of survivors should overhe
ar.
“I hear what you’re saying,” he said. “And you’re about right. There’s a lot of them against the doors on the Main Street side. They’re out there moaning.”
“You got a plan?”
Troy explained what they had to work with. The basketball hoops were the type that lower from the ceiling, so maybe some people could cling to those, out of reach. Maybe they could hide under the bleachers. The bathrooms could hold all the survivors, but the doors were only interior-grade hollow-core. He didn’t think they would stop anything.
“In fact,” he concluded, “they’re not even fire-rated for their present application.”
“Spoken like a fire chief,” Danny said. “So if a barricade isn’t going to work, and you’re pretty sure the exterior doors aren’t up to the job, we still gotta figure out how to get out of town. It’s just that there’s this new aspect to it, over.”
“Yeah—the ‘getting eaten’ aspect,” Troy whispered. “Over.”
Danny watched the zombies sliding along the glass wall outside, leaving oatmeal-like smears in their wake. They couldn’t see her, she was sure of it. But they could sense her somehow. Maybe they could remember that living people had gone inside. But she didn’t think so. The things didn’t seem to be able to retain information, or they might have reacted defensively when she started shooting them. Could they smell the living? Smell their blood? Did they recognize people they’d known in life?
She realized her train of thought was leading her into a place of sadness and horror, a place she couldn’t afford to go. Not yet. She spoke into the radio again.
“How are the survivors holding up over there? Over.”
“They’re flipping out,” Troy said. “It’s like one of those old disaster movies. You say ‘keep calm’ and they know they’re fucked. They’re trying to be cool, but it don’t play.”
“Okay, Troy, let’s pull ourselves together. I have half an idea,” Danny said, “…and the rest will come to me.”
Danny felt as if she was looking over the brow of a cliff. The world seemed to be tilting away, and she was going to fall. The injuries, the exhaustion, the sheer horror of the situation was dragging her over the edge. But most of all, it was what she realized she now had to do, if she were going to get those people to safety. She took a deep breath. Waited while the pulse rushed in her ears three times. Then she continued:
“What we need is a decoy.” As she spoke, the entire plan of action came into her mind.
“If those things are coming my way, you’ll have some room to get your people onto the RV. There’s going to be some shouting and some shooting. That will be me. Keep an eye on the crack in the door, be ready with the keys, and when you see an opening, get everybody to the motor home. Out.”
“Hang on, Sheriff,” Troy said.
“Come back,” Danny replied. She had a sinking feeling.
“One problem. Weaver has the keys. He’s with you.”
9
Danny had a system for dealing with despair. The first thing to do was to acknowledge that your situation sucked more than seemed fair. The second thing was to remember that “fair” was an imaginary idea that had no basis in reality. The third thing was to identify a simple long-term goal, something beyond the world of shit, and make that your purpose in life.
So Danny pictured herself sinking into a deep, hot bath, soaking until the water cooled off. That was the long-term goal. For now, all she had to do was get a thousand man-eating zombies to chase her down the street while two groups of survivors, between whom the thousand zombies were currently situated, joined up in a motor home at the far end of the street and drove away through an obstacle course of abandoned vehicles and yet more zombies.
There were some obvious difficulties with this scenario. It meant Danny would be going in the opposite direction from her ride, for one thing. In addition, her group of survivors had to somehow make it past all the undead. They might earlier have used the relative safety of the alley, but now it was no good, because Troy had carefully herded a hundred of the zombies into it. The woods were likely swarming with the undead, too, so taking the long way wouldn’t help. And even if they all got to the far end of town and reached the RV, Troy had his hands full, so if there were any complications down there, Danny wouldn’t be able to help. Somehow the despair kept creeping back.
Danny drank more water at the cooler and ate a Snickers bar out of the vending machine by the conference table. She watched her companions, the team she was going to be working with. Amy stuffed a backpack with first-aid supplies. Patrick was complaining to Weaver about how they should have gone to Hawaii like he wanted to do. It was probably an ordinary day in Hawaii. Weaver was grunting in response, Maria was listening to the radio with her chin in her hand, Wulf was circling around the back room like a caged tiger, muttering under his breath, and Michelle had fallen asleep in the second of the two cells, lying in the fetal position on the hard cot bolted to the wall.
Outside, the zombies were moaning. There was a faint thudding sound as they collided with the glass wall of the station.
Danny couldn’t come up with a way to make her plan workable, and meanwhile the sun was sinking toward the toothy ridge of the mountain above them. The situation was not improving with delay. She wondered how much ammunition they had in the gun safe. A thousand mixed rounds? More like two thousand, including what they’d confiscated over the last year. Fuck, she could go up on the roof and shoot the damn things in the head, one by one.
The roof.
A rush of inspiration hit Danny.
The roof of the station was lower than that of the building next door, but only by a few feet. And then, all along this side of Main Street, the roofs were flat. Different heights, but easy to cross, and there were only narrow passages between the buildings that didn’t share common walls. Three or four feet apart.
They could get as far as Vic’s Barber Shop, then slide down that pitched roof and it was only nine or ten feet from the eaves to the ground. Which would put them at the intersection of Pine and Main. Danny could get her people close to the motor home—within sprinting distance—without touching the pavement once. She didn’t think the mindless, hungry things outside would be able to figure out how to climb a drainpipe or operate a foldaway fire escape. They could make it.
Then Danny recalled that still left her running for her life in the opposite direction.
No plan was perfect.
She walked to the gun safe and unlocked it.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Danny began. She was about to issue orders when the glass wall at the front of the station shattered and collapsed.
The enormous windowpanes that made up the station frontage were set into steel frames. The frames were screwed into the brick footing and columns that supported the roof. The glass was held in the steel frames by narrow strips of channel molding on the inside. These moldings were made of aluminum, not steel, so they were easy to cut and bend during on-site installation. The moldings were set in place not by screws, but with fat beads of silicone caulk. This arrangement had served the community well for over fifty years. But it was never intended to be particularly secure. The original glazing had been untempered and not the least bit shatterproof; during the renovations in 1971 the entire wall was replaced with safety glass, which gave it a greenish tint and made the place earthquake-ready.
The safety glass was one-sixteenth of an inch thicker than the original glass, so screws had not been used to replace the moldings. The relatively new synthetic caulk was used instead, and it had gamely held the heavy sheets of glass in place for decades. The 1970s renovations committee had not considered the possibility that scores of living dead bodies would be throwing themselves against the glass. Decades later, it hadn’t occurred to Danny to check that the windows were properly anchored in their frames. Nobody broke into police stations, after all.
Danny rushed into the space behind the partition. From there she could see two doze
n zombies struggling beneath a sagging blanket of broken glass, the top still suspended in the frame. Even as she watched, the pane fell entirely, spilling a million glittering crumbs across the floor. It was the central one of three large panels that had given way, pushed out of the frame at the bottom by sheer biomass. The glazing was composed of sandwiched layers of glass and plastic, so it formed a pendulous sheet like a broken windshield. The zombies tore it apart in their struggle to get into the station. Although the brick footing of the wall was thigh-high, two of the things had already made it onto the station floor and were dragging themselves to their feet, fragments of glass falling from them like droplets of water.
Their eyes were on Danny. Already, they were on the hunt again.
For an instant, Danny thought the partition might stop them. But she knew better. It was only two-by-fours and plywood with Plexiglas above, not one of those serious bulletproof screens found in banks. She had sixty seconds, assuming the partition door even held that long.
Now there were ten zombies on their feet, lurching across the waiting area. The window had collapsed less than thirty seconds earlier. The rooftop escape was not going to happen. Danny’s fingers were clawing at the holster on her belt. There was no gun. She stepped backward out of the front room, closed the door, and turned to her companions.
“Wulf, you still want the Winchester?” she called out. But Wulf wasn’t there.
“He already took it,” Maria said. She was no longer at the radio. She stood against the wall, her hands crossed over her collarbones in a posture of supplication.
“And left,” added Weaver. He was locking the back door.
“That old sack of shit,” Danny said, wishing Wulf luck after her own fashion. She was in constant motion now, wasting no instant of time. Delegate, she thought, but she couldn’t think of a task it wouldn’t be quicker to do herself.
