by Ben Tripp
She took a chance getting close. The zombie was secreting foul-smelling fluid from its armpits, crotch, and mouth, as if the heat was causing it to dissolve. Its eyes were nearly opaque, but the thing knew right where she was, mouth yawning open. Could it taste her? Smell her?
Whatever. Danny crushed its temple with a single hard swing of the rock, and when the thing collapsed, she threw the rock at its head with both hands. She thought of her deputies, dead because she had needed them, and she wished there was some kind of built-in justice in the world. But there wasn’t. You had to make it yourself, and it was easy to get wrong.
Then Danny walked to the Buick, picked up the slain officer’s hat, slipped the Beretta out of the holster on his belt, and went back to the interceptor. She saluted the dead with her hip flask and took a long, burning pull of the liquor. Then she swallowed a mouthful of stale bottled water, radioed the all-clear to the rest of the convoy, and moved on.
The convoy rolled to a stop at the gates of Boscombe Field. The sun was going down. They had left the 137 behind for an even smaller road called Ore Creek Highway. It ran in a series of straight runs joined by long curves—the old wagon route—along the edge of Death Valley. They were now at least a hundred feet below sea level. Dim crags, almost two billion years old, imprisoned a lunar plain of jagged rock and sand. Rumpled yellow hills rose out of the dust at long intervals. The landscape was inhuman, ancient. It seemed too harsh to support life. Yet there were Joshua trees and golden grass and gnarled creosote bushes, tough survivors half-buried in the grit.
Ore Creek Highway ran through a series of old flat-bottomed river washes, shaped like branched lightning on the map. It was surrounded by tan sandstone hills, worn down until they resembled the biting surfaces of immense back teeth. Beyond the hills were low mountains, lacquered with rust, and beyond those were the distant blue crags. The road was in poor repair, having long been relegated to supporting the scant local traffic of prospectors, eccentrics, and park rangers, for whom potholes and cracks were a negligible inconvenience.
But Danny’s map had included the thing she was looking for: Boscombe Field, represented by a tiny airplane silhouette, right at the edge of the valley in a place called Shoshone Springs. There was no town, only the airfield. The nearest settlements of any size were Lone Pine to the west and Pahrump to the east. There were a few tiny towns along the 190 that ran straight through Death Valley, but their populations were minuscule and Danny didn’t think zombies could walk that far in the Death Valley heat. Unless a lot of other people had thought of hiding out at Boscombe Field, it would be an ideal refuge in which to spend a couple of weeks, waiting to see what happened out in the world.
Danny rolled up first, according to the system they had agreed upon, with the rest of the vehicles idling a quarter of a mile down the road. She was wearing the dead officer’s hat and sidearm when she stepped out of the car. The airfield was laid out in the middle of a long, shallow slope of gravel that extended for another half mile before abruptly jutting up into fang-topped cliffs of dark dolomite. The entire installation was surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with accordion wire. It looked to be a couple of square miles in area. The entire near end of the place was paved, and there was a single paved runway jutting across the dirt beyond. Several helipads were painted on the tarmac at the near end, upon one of which squatted the big, red Sikorski S-61 Sea King helicopter Danny remembered. Its five drooping rotor blades made it look as if the machine was asleep. Behind the helicopter, two large sheet-metal hangars dominated the field. A Cessna high-wing spotting plane was parked in front of the far hangar, and there were a couple of civilian aircraft visible behind the enormous building. Five large metal tanks were ranged along the fence at the back of the hangars.
There was a low control tower on the opposite side of the runway. Not far from the main gates, along the same axis as the runway, was a terminal building, according to the routed wood sign above the door. This was a low ranch-style structure with big, broad windows and a two-story addition at one end. Assorted sheds and outbuildings completed the infrastructure. Danny knew there would be generators and a machine shop. Because the Death Valley fire suppression arsenal was based here, there might also be emergency medical facilities. And there were probably showers.
Nobody was there. After a few attempts to raise someone on the radio and another with the interceptor’s loudspeaker, Danny used the regulation bolt-cutters to lop through the chain that bound the gates shut. Then she drove through the gates over a cast-iron cattle guard, into the parking area in front of the terminal. There were no crows in the sky, but a couple of hawks circled a mile away at a tremendous height. Danny had seen no zombies and no sign of traffic on the road. This remote corner of the world appeared to be deserted.
She drove around the outsides of all the major structures at Boscombe Field, then up and down the runway, watching the surrounding landscape for the undead. Over the last couple of days they’d seen them occasionally, away in the distance, little apostrophes punctuating the empty desert. How they got where they were, and where they were going, it was impossible to guess. Danny knew that for every standing zombie she saw, there could be ten more lying prone, out of sight. She saw none here at the airfield, so she reported back by radio: “Come on in, White Whale and Minnows. There may be a few zombies, but I haven’t seen them yet. Shut the gates behind you. This place could be sterile, and if it is we’re going to keep it that way.”
There was a collection of vehicles parked in the foremost hangar near the gates: In the front rank there was a small tanker truck for spraying firefighting chemicals, and a push-back tractor with wheels as tall as its body. Behind those was a light-duty pickup, an older sedan, a couple of golf carts, and a portable generator. In the back, hidden under a tarpaulin, was an immaculate 1957 Thunderbird with the original Starmist Blue paint.
Wulf emerged from the second hangar and gave the all-clear, at the same moment Topper got the generator going inside a big shed between the two hangars. Danny stepped out of the control tower building across the asphalt yard and raised her thumb in the air. They had already cleared the terminal building, and most of the survivors were inside it. Patrick hadn’t yet joined the party; he was once again cleaning out the White Whale.
“Topper, let’s do the perimeter together,” Danny called. Topper sketched a salute and headed for the fence that surrounded the airfield. He took a position opposite Danny, with Ernie following after him. Wulf shambled toward the RV, one hand thrust down the back of his evil pants, scratching. Danny started walking down the fence, Topper keeping pace on the far side. All members of the search team were equipped with short-range walkie-talkies that Troy had found inside the first hangar, neatly pegged onto a charging rack over a workbench.
The paved runway surface was about three thousand feet long, and before they’d gone a quarter of that distance, Danny could feel the sun eating into her skin through the rips in her shirt. She was glad for the hat. They all needed new clothes, except maybe Wulf. For him, four or five days in the same underwear was just the beginning. If he wore underwear, Danny reflected. The desert beyond the fence wobbled in the heat, the horizon lost in a salty haze. Danny could see a mirage of glittering water out there on the flat desert floor.
“I got a couple here, Sheriff,” Topper said over the walkie-talkie, about halfway down the runway. “I’ll drop ’em.”
“No,” Danny replied. “Wait for me.”
She trotted across the tarmac to where Ernie and Topper were leaning against the wire, watching a pair of the undead lurch toward them over the margin of crushed gravel riprap around the fence. Topper had his dead friend Mike’s automatic in his hand, but he refrained from the coup de grace according to Danny’s wishes. Both bikers seemed to respect her commands, Danny was glad to observe. She’d been on her best behavior since Agua Rojo, and between that and taking most of the dangerous jobs herself, she seemed to have gotten everybody to trust her again
.
Danny hooked her fingers through the fence and looked at the undead. One was a small Hispanic girl in a pink princess dress. She was missing her right arm at the shoulder, except for an elbow-length flap of skin that hung down her side. The other one was a portly adult male in boxer shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt. His bare feet were in tatters. How the zombies got here, Danny could not imagine. Maybe they rolled off one of those trucks full of corpses. Maybe the things had walked all the way over the mountains. Maybe—Danny couldn’t come up with anything. She looked at the little girl. She was wearing scuffed black patent leather shoes with straps across the instep. Kelley had always wanted a pair of those when she was small, but had to make do with no-name running shoes from Wal-Mart instead.
“Let’s take ’em down,” Topper said. He was obviously unnerved by the walking corpse of the child.
“No,” Danny said.
“Is this one of your rules, or is it a law?” Topper said, turning to face Danny. Maybe her hold on them wasn’t as strong as she thought.
“Let’s watch them. We can see if they have any problem-solving ability. And they’ll show us any gaps in the perimeter.”
Ernie nodded vigorously. “She’s good, Topper. You should ask her out,” he said.
Topper handed Ernie the gun.
“You keep watch, Cochise.”
•
Despite its name, the terminal building wasn’t so much a waystation as a bunkhouse, loosely modeled after the live-in facilities of a fire station: There was a communal kitchen, a dining hall, and a recreation room, both leading off a broad foyer at the front door. There were large bathrooms with multiple stall showers and wall-length mirrors over counters inset with half a dozen sinks. One was marked Aviators and the other Aviatrixes; the male facilities were twice the capacity of the female ones, reflecting the demographics of the relatively male world of aviation. In the upstairs addition was a long dormitory with three small private rooms, each with two single beds, and communal sleeping quarters with bunks for another twenty people, divided into male and female rooms. This arrangement was usually altogether empty, but during an outbreak of wildfires the entire place would be crammed with pilots, firefighters, and ground crew.
Between the canned goods, the showers, and the commercial washing machine, the survivors felt like they’d landed in heaven. Danny was no longer the crazy hard-ass cop. She was their savior.
6
Amy took the second-to-last shower. Among the women, only Danny had yet to bathe. It was the fourth night of the disaster, the fifth night since Kelley ran away, and they had, at last, found a scrap of normalcy in the mad universe.
The hot water seemed to be inexhaustible and there was a gallon jug of cheap strawberry-scented shampoo. The lights were on, there was a thousand-gallon tank of diesel feeding the generator, and everybody had feasted on boiled rice, Vienna sausages from jars, and succotash from a huge tin that reminded Danny of the spilled jalapeños on the floor of the Wooden Spoon, and therefore of scorched human flesh. She had skipped the meal on the pretext of checking the perimeter one more time. But the rest of them were fed and clean and feeling a little more secure on the safe side of a twelve-foot fence.
The two zombies, the man and the girl, had wandered listlessly along the wire for a couple of hours, but showed no intelligence at all. They clutched at the fence mesh and hung their mouths open and moaned periodically, staring at the lights that burned in the buildings, but they didn’t have the wits to creep toward the gate, or climb over or dig under the fence.
Danny was also keeping herself scarce because she didn’t want to listen to the compliments and enthusiasms of her motley band of survivors. Some of them, like Michelle and her brother Jimmy James, remained subdued, their grief still fresh. The college-age couple, Martin and the girl, whose name Danny was not surprised to find was Pfeiffer, were also sad and kept mostly to themselves, sitting on the brown Naugahyde couch in the rec room with their backs to four shelves full of National Geographic and aviation magazines.
At last, however, most of them were upstairs or in the rec room and Danny was able to slip unobserved into the aviatrix’s room, where Amy was luxuriating under an old-fashioned sunflower showerhead. Danny pulled off her boots and unbuttoned her shirt, but she didn’t want to stand around naked in front of the big mirror on the wall over the sinks. She wanted to get straight into the shower.
“Hey, Amy,” she said. Amy jumped, spun around, and wiped the suds out of her eyes.
“Don’t scare me! I have this fear thing.”
“Sorry,” Danny said. She contemplatively picked a couple of chunks of fried hair off her head. She glanced sidelong at the mirror and saw what the others saw: She was an apparition, covered in dirty, peeling skin, the flesh red and raw underneath. Lips like fried bacon. No eyebrows, no eyelashes, her hair a mass of rusty gristle, burned to stubble in front. Her ragged uniform was so filthy it looked like camouflage cloth.
“What,” Amy said.
“You read Kelley’s note, right?”
Amy rinsed the shampoo out of her hair, bent double so the water ran her hair into a point that hung from her forehead. She didn’t answer right away. Danny figured she was trying to second-guess which one of the five hundred points addressed in the note Danny wanted to discuss.
“Yeah,” Amy said, drawing the middle of the word out into a question.
“Are you really into women?” Danny asked.
“Not if they smell like you,” Amy said.
In the end, Danny had to shower with the water almost entirely cold; her skin was so thoroughly burned, scraped, cut, and bruised that the hot water felt like boiling pickle juice. Still, she stayed under the cool spray for a long time, allowing the dead skin to soak off and gently working out the worst of the burnt parts of her hair. Then she put on the clothes Amy had gathered for her: an extra-large T-shirt that went to her knees, and a pair of disposable Tyvek painter’s pants from one of the hangars.
Stinging all over, but much refreshed, Danny allowed Amy to lead her to the motor home, inside which Patrick intended to stay the night now that it was safely behind a fence.
It was around 10:00 P.M., with a deep black sky frosted with stars overhead. A man named Simon, an accountant by trade, was taking first watch up in the control tower. Beyond the gates, Danny’s interceptor was parked facing down the long slope of Boscombe Field Road: she had decided to leave it out there, she explained to the others, to serve as an indication that someone was in residence at the airfield. Depending on the motives of such travelers as might happen by, it would serve as a welcome—or a warning. The zombies wouldn’t care.
“Look at you,” Patrick said, spreading his arms and smiling. Danny was touched to realize he was genuinely pleased to see her. There were bags under his eyes and his skin was chalky. But he’d put on a clean shirt from one of the hidden closets in the bedroom, there was music playing low and soft on the seven-channel sound system, and the interior of the White Whale was invitingly clean and orderly. Danny saw a small framed picture of Weaver on the wet bar. There was a narrow black ribbon draped across one corner of the frame.
Patrick gave Danny a hug, rubbing her back. Then he held her at arm’s length and looked straight into her eyes with a look of concern he’d perfected on television when revealing to hapless homeowners that they had made fatal decorating decisions.
“Sheriff D., I have to ask you something embarrassing.”
“Okay,” Danny said, thinking, This is the night for embarrassing questions. Amy was looking in the fridge of the galley kitchen.
“What,” Patrick asked, “did you do to your back?”
Danny felt her face go hot and redder than ever. She looked around for help. Amy was scrupulously avoiding eye contact, head halfway into the fridge.
“I got burned,” Danny said. “In Iraq.”
Patrick nodded. “So that’s why there’s a running joke about ‘you got wounded but you won’t say where’?”
“Have you ever heard of ‘La Mer’? It’s a skin cream.”
Patrick bustled off to the bathroom and emerged with a small jar.
“This stuff is a hundred twenty bucks an ounce. Great for scars, burns, the works.”
“Amy gave me this stuff called ‘Bag Balm.’ It’s like five bucks a pound.”
Amy chimed in: “It’s for cow udders, but it greases up the old scorcheroos on Danny, too. I don’t think that Mer stuff would last for more than a day. Show him, Danny. It’s amazing.”
“Uh, no,” Danny said.
Patrick made a face and set the jar down in front of Danny, who was now sitting on one of the bar stools. Danny indicated the bottles locked in the cabinet behind the bar.
“You got any Black Label?”
“I can’t believe it,” he said, his eyes growing wet.
“What.”
“The only reason I have Black Label is Weaver liked it.”
“Peas in a pod,” Danny said, thirsting for a drink. She watched Patrick fool around with glasses and ice cubes for what felt like a year and a half, but at last she had the drink in front of her, swizzle stick and paper napkin and everything, like in a real bar. Amy was sitting on the couch by now, head tipped back. Danny drank most of the scotch and then pretended to savor the rest.
“So what brings you estimable ladies to my humble abode?” Patrick asked, fussing around. He was getting self-conscious, Danny saw. She hated that. She wanted to relax, and he was feeling awkward.
“I’m looking to feel normal for a few minutes. You have a drink, too,” Danny suggested. “These may be the last ice cubes on earth.”
Two hours later, the three of them were fairly well plastered.
