by Ben Tripp
“Danny? You got another plan?”
“There’s too many.”
“Two bullets,” said Amy, “is all we need.”
Amy took Danny’s gun hand and guided it to the middle of her forehead, the end of the barrel pressed into the skin. She looked into Danny’s eyes, and Danny understood why Amy was beside her, instead of tooling up 144 toward Big Bear. Because, even after she was gone so long in the desert at war, or maybe for that reason, Amy needed her more than she needed herself. If not Kelley, there was Amy. If not Danny, Amy didn’t want to live.
Danny was touched. She pulled back the action on the pistol. Amy closed her eyes.
Bang
Danny looked around. She hadn’t even pulled the trigger. What was the gunshot? Amy opened her eyes, staring at the zombie behind Danny that had just puked its brains out of its ear.
Bang
It happened again, and a zombie went down with its head emptied out like a piñata, close behind Amy.
Bang
Sniper.
Danny almost hit the deck, but then she remembered: They were in America. No snipers here; not many, at least.
Bang.
Another zombie flew off its feet, and Danny swiveled around to look in the opposite direction from where the zombie’s brains had gone.
“Run, you dumb shitheads!” Wulf bellowed.
He was up on the roof of the Quik-Mart with the Winchester 70, working the bolt action and firing again. The zombie that clutched Danny’s shoulder snapped clear out of her field of view with a hole in its head.
“You old son of a bitch,” Danny said, and grabbed Amy’s arm.
“Danny? Let’s boogie,” Amy said. Amy had to help her stay upright, but Danny ran as best she could.
Wulf kept up a steady fire for at least a minute and a half. He was slipping those shells into the gun like a lover: pop the trigger smooth as silk, another zombie in the scope gets its card pulled. Squirt of black oatmeal and down. Nothing to it. Reload. Pop. Down. Wulf’s eyes stung with perspiration. He experienced the rush that he’d not felt since he left Vietnam, all those years ago. Decades. He’d been asleep, drunk, pissed off, ruining marriages, half-raising crooked kids who didn’t give a shit about him, kids who told their lovers he was dead. Maybe grandkids by now. All he knew was the old fighting machinery—that infernal engine with only one use on this godforsaken earth, given him by the U.S. government in return for anything else he ever could have been—was running again like he’d last topped up the battery and oiled the cylinders with Marvel Mystery Oil this very morning, not forty years earlier.
He rocked the bolt back and chambered another slim, sharp round and there was the head in the scope and he blew the skull open, another zombie out of the sheriff’s way. Wulf was going to see that tough little gal lived. He’d seen everything she did, from up on the rooftops. He’d watched her draw the enemy out, take stupid risks, and he’d even thought about popping her through the head a couple of times, to save her the trouble of dying underneath all those bloody teeth. But she kept on going, outmaneuvering death at every turn, so he kept on letting her, and when he saw that crazy veterinary come along, Wulf could have thrown up it was so damn touching. But he figured the time had arrived. He sighted on the sheriff’s scorched, half-scalped head, crosshairs intersecting at the vein jumping in her temple.
Yet when it had come to the moment to shoot the high-toned cripple bitch, as that old peckerwood Sheriff Booth had called her, Wulf couldn’t do it. Not even as a mercy killing. Any more than he could kill himself for the same reason. She’d be like Wulf, soon enough. Couple-few years. Pass the baton and die in a ditch, that was plan enough for an old man.
Meanwhile, he laid down fire. One after another the zombies dropped, and it was like a scythe swinging through the undead. They were at a tough angle now, though, so Wulf got himself up and ran and threw himself across the narrow space between this roof and the next and went down on his knee again, sucking wind because he was too damn old, and twitched off a couple more rounds that cleared the way pretty damn good for an old asshole, as he thought to himself. Now two more, then reload, and keep on shooting. Hadn’t missed a single one yet.
They came to the sleek interceptor left behind by the late highway patrolman Park, and Danny realized she had the answer to the whole damn thing. Troy was pulling the motor home around in a wide, messy arc in the broad intersection of Pine and Main, crunching abandoned cars out of the way, and he wasn’t going to be able to reverse to Danny and Amy. But neither were they going to make it on foot to the motor home’s present position. Not if he hit the gas before the sheer mass of zombies blocked them in on all sides, which he had damn well better do in the next few seconds.
The daylight was beginning to fade.
“Danny, no!” Amy shouted, but she didn’t even sound all that sure of why she was saying it. It was almost a question. Danny was running back into the legion of zombies that were right behind them, half their number hideously burned black and red and crackled fat-white by the gasoline fire, but not the least bit deterred.
“We can make it!” Amy cried. She was pressed up against the highway patrol interceptor and there was another bang and Wulf had taken the nearest zombie down again, and bang, another one.
Then Danny was running straight back at Amy with keys in her hand.
“Get in the goddamn car,” Danny rapped, and threw the keys to Amy. Amy got in. Out of the corner of her eye Danny saw Wulf, a misshapen hulk leaping apelike to the roof of the barber shop. There was a rifle in his fist. The old man slid down the far side of the roof, hurled himself out into space, and Danny lost sight of him; Amy found the ignition and shoved the key in and Danny was in the seat beside her and Amy got the engine going and she floored the gas pedal.
Four zombies flew over the hood, legs bent at crazy angles from where they’d hit the fender rams on the front of the car. Then there was a space, and Amy took it and whacked a couple of zombies aside. Danny hung on to the shotgun mount on the dashboard as Amy slalomed through the next opening and kept on driving after the RV that was now powering up Route 114 into the last glow of the sunset, shoving abandoned cars out of its way.
Just before they passed out of the end of Main Street and under the boughs of the tall, dark trees, Danny saw Wulf on the roof of the motor home. He was clinging to the luggage rack, looking back into town, the rifle in his hands. The wind blew his long, matted hair around. His eyes looked like chips of stone under shaggy brows. It could have been twenty thousand years ago. The original man, with his weapon and his filth and his will to live, watching the unknown world that swarmed with enemies, and death. And yet the master of it all. Might be the master no more.
Then the shade of the trees flew up around him, and he was gone from sight, and Danny closed her eyes. Amy kept driving into the darkness.
1
Danny wanted to drive.
The night was a hallucination. Danny slept through most of it, although she drifted awake for a few seconds now and then. They traveled at a crawl: There were roadblocks and checkpoints set up mostly by civilians, and the night was lit up in places by flares, whirling emergency lights, even fires. There was gunfire. Radios blared in fire trucks. The Forest Peak convoy idled in long lines of other vehicles escaping through the resort communities, creeping past crashes and dead bodies and teams of men with guns. At one point there was an argument between Amy and several men.
Danny was so groggy she couldn’t join in, although it had something to do with her. Amy was insisting Danny was living and breathing, and some kid with a flashlight was shining it in Danny’s face and someone asking, “Is she alive?” Then, what felt like weeks later, there was an argument at a checkpoint concerning the RV. Somebody wanted to take it for some reason. Another argument, this time with Troy pitching in. Danny saw him shaking a rifle by way of emphasis. After a while, they moved on.
Danny remembered the tree shadows outside Forest Peak, and pale, misshapen bo
dies looming out of the darkness into the headlights. Their eyes had reflected yellow. Later, Danny had come out of a doze, and saw Amy with thick rivulets of tears spilling down her dirty face, mouth bent down in grief, knuckles white on the steering wheel. But she was silent, and kept her eyes on the road. Danny went back to sleep.
The woman, veiled in black from head to toe, was not holding a baby. It was a bomb. Danny was sure of it. The rippling desert horizon was a burnt orange line between brown sky and yellow sand.
Danny brought the Mossberg up waist-high. “Drop it,” she called. “Drop it.” The tanks were idling with their snoring rumble behind the farmhouse—she was all alone, until the rest of the patrol trotted around to her position. All alone with the woman in black.
The woman looked at Danny with eyes like obsidian. She raised the thing in her hands, as if offering it to God. Danny could see it now. A satchel mine of Chinese manufacture. A gunshot split the baking air. Somewhere to the left—
Danny awoke with her head against the doorframe and watched the pavement unspool beyond the windshield. It got quieter on their route, and after a few turnoffs the convoy had the entire road pretty much to itself. Most people were going the opposite direction, headed for Lancaster or Bakersfield. She had gotten plenty of sleep by her standards, six and a half hours according to the dashboard clock. Better than average. She needed to pee and stretch and drink a very large amount of water, eat a huge, fatty breakfast at a booth in a big chain restaurant, then sit in the shade and drain a bottle of something crazy expensive like Chinaco Anejo. Maybe get the dreamed-of soak in a deep, hot bathtub after that. Then pass out on the bed for three days.
For now, it was time for Amy to let Danny drive, because they were going to go the wrong way.
It was dark but the sky at the horizon was glowing rose-gray with dawn, and when Danny saw that there was a horizon she realized they’d made it all the way down out of the mountains. She could still remember vague passages of the night, but her impressions were jumbled and fading.
Now they were heading downhill, but on a gentle grade, with the black bulk of the mountains on their left and a broad, flat landscape to the right, unmarked by streetlights or neon, even in the far distance. The sun would rise straight ahead of them; they were driving almost due east. Scobie Tree would be somewhere up ahead.
There were decisions to be made.
Danny twisted around to look out the rear window, and her body protested with audible creaks. The motor home was directly in back, and behind that were several other, smaller vehicles with their headlights on.
“You awake?” Amy said.
“I guess,” Danny said, and turned carefully to face the front again.
One of Danny’s front teeth was chipped. There was a rough edge she couldn’t stop rubbing with her tongue. She held up her hands and examined them. Her skin was uniformly filthy, blackened, smeared with ash and dark blood. Her palms were scraped up, her right knuckles skinned, and both hands were shiny-hairless and blistered from the heat of the gasoline fires. Her left ring finger was missing part of the nail. The nail bed had bled until it formed a black crust. Her left sleeve was gone and there were three perfectly legible human bite marks on the upper arm. None of them had broken the skin. They looked like red tattoos. She checked her aching calf and found a similar mark, the skin there also intact.
There were hand-print bruises on both her wrists and a long, jagged cut ran up her right forearm. There was a piece of metal protruding from the end of the cut. She pulled it out. The thing didn’t want to come, tugging a pyramid of skin with it until at last it slipped free. It was a splinter of chromed steel, three-quarters of an inch long. Blood rose up in a ball where she’d removed the splinter, then ran down her skin.
Danny thought of Weaver with the dead eyes and the windshield wiper arm sticking out of his chest. Her own chest was half-exposed, or at least the sports bra was. Her shirt was in tatters. She felt the pocket and Kelley’s note was still inside. It might not be legible, but she still had it.
Kelley.
Oh, dear Lord, Kelley.
“We need to talk about where we’re going,” Danny said.
“To civilization,” Amy replied, not looking over at Danny.
“Civilization? We don’t know where that is. We got to keep away from any large human population until we know how many zombies there are. This wasn’t a local thing, Amy.”
“You need a hospital.”
“There probably aren’t any hospitals anymore. Trust me. That’s where everybody took the dead.”
Danny considered their enemy. The disease, if that’s what it was, had a brilliant strategy for self-promotion. The running and screaming was a great start. But then human nature became its best ally, as untold numbers of the dead (walking or otherwise) were brought to first responders: police, fire stations, emergency rooms. Then, after a little break in the festivities, they turned cannibal. So there wouldn’t be an intact emergency facility of any kind for a hundred miles, Danny suspected. You were more likely to be eaten than treated.
Danny got on the radio, and Patrick answered her call.
“Glad you’re alive,” he said. “Is Weaver with you?”
Danny took a long time to answer. The silence told Patrick what she couldn’t put into words.
“Oh,” Patrick said.
Troy took over the conversation. “Sheriff, we should stop for a break soon. This bus is getting crowded.”
They pulled over into a rest stop surrounded by acres of dry grass and gravel. Troy led a couple of expeditious men on a scouting sortie, inside and behind the toilet building, and around the dumpsters parked off to the side of the paved area.
“Have them keep a lookout,” Danny said. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the interceptor with her legs out the door, boot heels resting on the ground. She should get up, but she’d been overcome with drugged torpor. In the absence of an urgent, life-or-death call to action, she couldn’t lift a finger.
She watched the survivors stand in line for the toilets. The men who just needed to take a leak were going around the back of the building. People were trying their cell phones, getting nothing. Danny thought of Kelley’s cell phone, the contract too expensive to keep. It was in a kitchen drawer back at the house.
Dawn was a few minutes away, the sky a pale eggshell green shot with pink. The fields of grass were dim, the color of cardboard. In daylight they would be golden brown. Patrick emerged from the men’s room with an aluminum flask containing water and carried it over to the interceptor.
“Thanks,” Danny said, and tried to take the water, but her fingers wouldn’t close on the container. Patrick tipped the mouth of the flask against Danny’s lower lip; she drank hungrily, water spilling down her chin. Then she looked at Patrick. His face was grave, his eyes sad like some saint in an old painting.
“We should talk,” Danny said.
“Was it quick?” Patrick was holding back a flood of grief, his chin quaking.
“He never knew,” Danny said. “We’re here ’cause of him.”
“Did he say anything before it happened?”
“The last thing he said was I should take care of you,” Danny said. It wasn’t true. The last thing he’d said was fuck. Danny was a terrible liar, and even as she spoke, it sounded like week-old bullshit.
Patrick smiled, although tears spilled from his eyes. “He never would have said that. He would have said I’m supposed to take care of you.”
“That was it,” Danny nodded.
Bless his heart, Patrick believed it. He took a gulp of air and walked back to the RV with his shoulders squared, and Danny felt as if she had just made some kind of blood vow that could never be broken. Her heart ached along with the rest of her. She owed Patrick more than she had to give. Weaver might still be alive, if she’d done things differently. Still—she crammed the remorse down into the hole where all the untimely feelings went. She could grieve over her own failings some other time.
There was plenty enough grieving to do as it was.
They had been at the rest stop about fifteen minutes. The sun rose, splendid and hot, gilding the mountains that marched off into the purple distance. Danny hauled herself out of the interceptor and took a brief walk around it, careful not to move farther away than she could reach, in case she collapsed. Amy was busy dealing with Michelle’s knees on the steps of the RV, pouring something over the scrapes.
People were coming out of the toilets looking tidier than before. Danny knew she would have to clean herself up, as impossible as the effort sounded to her at this moment. But right now, before these civilians started arguing about what to do next, it was time for a quick come-to-Jesus meeting. Danny put two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle. Her lower lip split. Heads turned. For an instant she saw the zombies turning, too, but then it was gone. Just a phantom in her mind.
“Listen up,” she whispered. “Listen up,” she tried again, and this time people heard and they walked toward her. Soon the entire group of survivors had emptied out of the toilets and was gathered around the interceptor, except Amy and Michelle, still at the RV. And Wulf. He had just disappeared again, and that seemed to be his way, so Danny put him out of her mind. The survivors she didn’t know personally all had fear of her in their eyes, same as the Iraqis: acutely alert, pulled-back, as if confronting a growling dog. Anger spat through Danny’s mind. You owe me, shitheads, show me a smile, she thought, but only cleared her throat.
Amy joined the group, in the back row. There were around twenty-five or thirty survivors in the bunch. Danny could see Patrick and Maria and Michelle with her arm around her brother. Troy was standing in the back near Amy. Familiar faces. At least she’d helped keep them alive.
