by Ben Tripp
“How long have you been at it?” Danny asked. Maria carefully rotated a coffee cup on the console so that the handle made a full circuit.
“Since morning.”
“Take any breaks?”
“A couple. I’ll sleep up here for now.” She looked exhausted, her brown face yellowish.
“Save your energy,” Danny said. “We’ll be here at least another week, no matter what happens, okay? If they heard you, they heard you. They know where the signal is coming from.”
“Who is they?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know,” Danny said, and wished she had any talent for lying.
A bad liar, but perfectly capable of omission, the negative space surrounding a lie. Danny had intended to wait another night, to make sure things were entirely quiet and everyone was settled. But after tonight’s unpleasant interviews, it was time. She’d had the plan in place since before Riverton Junction, but originally it was supposed to be a kind of side venture along with protecting as many living people as she could. Now, however, the people she had were safe enough. She could easily be back before they ran out of supplies. Unless she died, in which case it was a moot point. But they were only going to hold her back, and make speeches about how fucked up she was, and wander off to piss in the bushes and get attacked by zombies.
There were a couple of gallons of water stashed in the interceptor, and some energy bars. She had enough ammunition to stage the end of The Wild Bunch, thanks to the zeal of the California Highway Patrol purchasing department. She even had a box of Road Blocker rounds, shotgun casings with a single ball inside, capable of penetrating an engine block. And she had Kelley’s note, once again tucked in her shirt pocket. She waited until one in the morning, pretending to sleep on the couch in the downstairs office of the tower. Maria was snoring upstairs. It was time.
One of the light aircraft parked on the edge of the tarmac was a high-wing Piper, and the tip of its wing was only a couple of feet from one of the pressurized fire retardant tanks. These tanks stood higher than the fence, and less than four feet away from it. The fence was there to keep people out, not in. Danny’s presence around the airport at all hours was expected by the watches, so when Simon, sitting out his watch in the control tower, saw her walk across the pavement with a rucksack in her hand, he thought nothing of it. She moved off into the shadows behind the hangars. It didn’t occur to him to make note of her return, so he didn’t realize it never happened.
The interceptor was parked on the far side of the illuminated area beneath the single exterior light that burned above the airfield gates. That was also part of Danny’s plan. A watchman’s eyes would get accustomed to the darkness. From the tower he could see miles of desert. But he would have one blind spot: the glare of that single light. The light was exactly positioned between the tower and the interceptor.
When Danny pushed the car down the shallow slope of Boscombe Field Road, following the example of Ted and his fellow escapees, Simon didn’t see it. Whether or not he saw the taillights when she started the engine a half-mile away, it hardly mattered. She was gone.
8
The miles swept beneath Danny’s wheels.
The interceptor rode on wings of darkness through the night, its headlight beams burning a path through the shadows. She rode the center line and the road became a swiftly flowing river of stone running through a black tunnel toward a distant, unknown goal. Features whipped past: stark forms of rock, skeletons of trees and bushes, fences flashing their Morse code of posts and rails. Sometimes a sign would emerge from the dark, its reflective surface glowing like a one-eyed cat, looming large, then in a stroke of light it would be gone behind her. The roar of the engine and the thrum of the tires became a dirge for a dead civilization. The thunder of blood in her ears kept time to the growling threnody of the machine.
Danny drove until the gasoline was gone, and found more, and drove again until the sun rose, always searching, her mind analyzing the words in the note for clues to Kelley’s plan.
Danny had a new working hypothesis, but it meant covering a thousand square miles. Or ten thousand. She needed something more to work on than the speculation that Kelley would head for San Francisco, because she’d been there before. She sought a clue, what the better detectives called a tell, some unconscious action that directed attention toward what the suspect wanted to conceal. There had to be a tell somewhere in the note. Danny had the thing almost memorized. It had to be something in the loose handful of facts she knew, or could guess. She knew, for example, that the Mustang had a driving range of between 230 and 260 miles from full to empty. It was on half a tank when Kelley stole it. So assuming she took the route Danny thought most likely, Kelley would have had to fill up the tank in Riverton Junction. Danny had surreptitiously checked the cash register of the gas station for a receipt that could have clued her to Kelley’s earlier presence, but there was nothing to go on. Most cars carried sixteen or seventeen gallons of gasoline, same as the Mustang. There were fifteen receipts for that amount or less on the Fourth of July. Kelley would have used cash, so there was no telltale credit card slip with her blessed signature on it.
Then again, Kelley could have taken a different route altogether. She might have heard there was trouble on the radio and decided to hole up somewhere, or she might have kept on going straight up to the 58 to the 99 to the 5 to San Francisco. Eight hours’ driving, at most, if she kept the hammer down and didn’t stop to eat, which she wouldn’t. It seemed like Kelley could go days without eating. If she made it to San Francisco, she was either dead or very, very lost, and Danny would not find her on her own. Danny’s hypothesis stopped working about two tanks of gas away from Forest Peak. San Francisco, Las Vegas, Glendale, Arizona—even Tijuana, Mexico: A determined girl could make any of those places from Forest Peak in a single day, and still have time for a restaurant meal afterward. Hell, she could cross the entire country in four days.
So Danny stuck with the current hypothesis. It was that, or concede her mission was insane.
She kept on driving through the night, the white lines whipping under the interceptor like tracer rounds from a .50 caliber machine gun. She had forgotten everything behind her. Amy, the other survivors, the airfield, they were old memories. By dawn, her mouth hung open and her face was pale. Her eyes were glassy and vacant. She saw herself in the rearview mirror and for an instant she was looking at a zombie, not herself. She snapped her jaw shut and pulled off the road, to rest for a while beneath the tortured limbs of a piñon pine. It stood beside a dry creek in a plain of cheatgrass and red brome, two non-native species that had wiped out most of the local vegetation. Danny felt a certain kinship with the tree. There was another non-native species around, and it was wiping out the locals, too.
Danny woke up startled, her stomach lurching with a sensation as if she’d caught herself falling. Immediately she scanned her surroundings. No zombies in view. The interior of the car was sweltering hot. Danny had opened the windows only a couple of inches despite the heat; she didn’t want anything reaching in and grabbing her while she slept. Now it was a quarter to nine in the morning—she had been asleep for two and a half hours. Time to get moving again. She started the engine and rolled back toward the road, kicking up a thick cloud of dust. And before the wheels were back on the tar, another piece of the puzzle had clicked into place.
Kelley had mentioned that social reject, Zap Owler, in her note. She wrote of how Owler sold methamphetamine at the go-kart tracks in the flatlands. And she specifically mentioned the one Danny had taken her to for her seventh birthday. That was Kartland, in Potter. Danny remembered that Kelley didn’t seem to enjoy it much, but she could sure drive. That little face in the big red rental helmet, pale with big dark eyes, Kelley’s expression set and grim from the moment she stepped onto the track until the end of her third race. Danny hadn’t been able to beat her, even though she started ramming Kelley’s kart from behind. Her theory at the time had been that Kelley didn’t w
eigh anything, so her kart had a speed advantage. But in fact the kid was a born driver, and determined. Kelley had a grape slushie after the races, and then she was in the bathroom forever because she had to completely drape the crapper with toilet paper, forming a hygienic bird’s nest around the seat.
Danny’s sinuses started to ache. Tears wanted to come. She inhaled and exhaled and pushed the loss back down where it wouldn’t get in the way. Her hands were locked hard around the steering wheel. They had some good times in there, Danny thought. A few. She had a terrible feeling those were the only good times Kelley ever had.
But she had to keep her mind on this clue, if it was a clue, to Kelley’s plans. Danny thought Kelley was smarter than she was, by a fair amount. But she wasn’t more clever. She didn’t yet know the means by which people give themselves away in conversation, reveal their thoughts or motives.
Danny, however, had spent years doing it: first in Iraq, trying to second-guess those poor inscrutable bastards that had to call the place home, and second in the American police business. Nobody knows how to talk straight to a uniform.
Danny had the note out, pinned to the steering wheel with her right thumb.
Zap Owler cooks speed in his kitchen and sells it down in the flatlands at go-kart tracks. Including that place by the freeway you took me for my seventh birthday.
There was something to that. Why did Kelley mention that particular place? Why not the track in Riverside they went to a couple of years later, with Danny’s then-boyfriend Kyle Williams? Or the school outing to Race-world, where Kelley won five bucks off Mr. Carter by winning two out of three kart races against her classmates? Mr. Carter the porno king, Kelley had written.
Danny folded the note back up and stowed it in her pocket. She couldn’t see a reason why Kelley would name one track over the others, unless it was on her mind for some unstated reason. Danny had been there each time, and they’d had about the same kind of fun. If Owler sold speed at Kartland, he sold it at the other tracks, too; they were all about the same distance away. But it was Kartland she specifically mentioned.
The town of Potter, where Kartland was, connected to the big roads. It had a railway station. Amtrak came through that way. You could get to Colorado by morning. It was a fair-sized town where strangers wouldn’t stick out. Three gas stations, a bunch of fast-food places with those hundred-foot-tall signs off the freeway, and an ideal place for a teenaged girl to gas up a car and take her pick of destinations.
Danny felt a terrible sense of foreboding. If Kelley had gone to Potter, her next step could have been toward anywhere. The trail would run cold. But Potter was the one place she had mentioned in the note besides Forest Peak and Iraq, and Kelley didn’t have a passport and she wasn’t nuts, so she wasn’t on her way to Iraq.
The interceptor’s low fuel light came on.
Danny’s reasoning hit the wall with the idea of Potter. If that’s where Kelley went, Danny would have to start looking along all the major routes, following the roads and the train tracks across the entire American West. She scoured her brain for some limiting factor, her right foot jammed to the floor of the interceptor as she raced the machine toward Potter.
What about money? Kelley could have stowed away any amount from two hundred dollars to a thousand, Danny guessed. She had her own account at the bank and she’d had a part-time job at the Quik-Mart since graduating high school, plus a little extra income helping Amy down at the veterinary clinic. How much? Could she afford the gas or a train ticket to New York, for example? The money had to go in the “unknown” category, and again Danny cursed herself for not knowing more about Kelley’s life. She had been unforgivably incurious about her sister’s daily existence. All this time, Danny had been accusing Kelley of being morbidly self-absorbed—now Danny could see with excruciating clarity that the self-absorbed one was herself.
She remembered her own drunken harangues, the hours of browbeating and railing against what she saw as Kelley’s obstinacy and selfishness, and she felt fathomless regret. Every minute of it had been nothing less than abuse.
At that moment Danny wanted a drink more than she wanted to breathe. Car needs gas, driver needs buzz. Gotta have it. But her supply had run out the previous evening, the precious fluid sloshing lower and lower in the flask tucked between her thighs. Potter was only a few miles ahead. She could recharge all fluids.
Now, what else besides money would shape Kelley’s thinking? Danny couldn’t come up with anything in the note, so she conjured up the map in her mind’s eye, intricately detailed around Forest Peak, getting less and less informative as it extended outward. Was Kelley even on the map? If so, was she alive, or dead, or undead? Only time would tell. And maybe not even that.
Time. Undead. A set of rusty little tumblers in Danny’s head turned over, and there was an idea back in there somewhere, if she could just reach it. Danny teased it out of the shadows. Time was a variable. It would shape Kelley’s behavior. That was it. Kelley fled Forest Peak sometime after midnight on the Fourth of July. She could have driven all night. She probably did. That would have placed her in Potter by morning, long before the crisis began. Would Kelley have stayed in Potter for a while? Things began to break down by around two o’clock in the afternoon. If she was listening to the police radio in the Mustang, as Danny was sure Kelley would have done, she would have known of the disaster sweeping Los Angeles long before most people did. She might have decided to stay where she was until she knew what was happening.
No, Danny didn’t think so. Kelley would have seen the disaster as the hand of fate trying to push her back to Forest Peak. She would have taken it personally—just as Danny had. She would have pushed on.
Danny wiped a rivulet of sweat off her face. The air-conditioning was blasting, but her skin was wet. Her heart thudded against her ribs. She was digging down to the last variables, the last possible conjectures she could make about Kelley. Soon it would be time to stop wondering and start searching, and there would be nothing to think about. Nothing she wanted to think about, at least. That’s when the bottle would come in handy. Would Kelley have gone on alone, even knowing there was a wave of death swarming the countryside? Would Kelley have gone on alone in any case?
But Kelley didn’t know anybody, anywhere else. To push on in the face of an ever-mounting crisis, all alone without a cell phone or credit cards or even a vehicle that belonged to her, would seem pretty daunting to a sheltered kid from a small town. It was the kind of thing even Danny wouldn’t have dared to do back at that age, unless maybe Amy was with her. But Kelley didn’t have any of that kind of friends.
Friends? Maybe Kelley had a boyfriend or something, waiting somewhere for a liaison. Impossible to say. Danny simply had no idea. She always assumed every male with eyes was ogling Kelley, the gloomy Goth girlie with longer legs than her big sister and no keloidal burn scars over 30 percent of her body. It was part protective reflex and part jealousy to think that way, Danny knew. She hadn’t gotten laid in the better part of a year, and she didn’t remember the last time very well on account of the many rum and Cokes involved. She felt ugly. So she almost deliberately avoided knowing what Kelley was up to, and with whom she was up to it. Was Kelley a virgin? Jesus, Danny didn’t know anything.
Danny wondered how long the fuel reserve would last before the interceptor’s engine quit. She still had a big chunk of road to cover before the next gas station.
When at a dead end, go back to the last crossroads. Danny reached with her mind, back through the nightmarish week she’d just survived, to the events of Independence Day morning in Forest Peak. The last normal day in the history of the world. She had been hung over. She had just arrested Wulf, who was still drunk. She’d found Kelley’s note. Ted was eating on duty, and there were firecrackers setting her teeth on edge. Was there anything else? Hadn’t there been something somebody said? Something about runaways?
A bolt of ice shot down Danny’s spine. The sweat on her skin turned cold, and her
mouth dried up. She knew. She was sure of it. A kid named Barry Davis. One of the faces around town, nobody special. He faded into the scenery. The only reason Danny knew of him at all was that his mother was a pain in the ass, always calling the station to complain about Barry for things that weren’t illegal. She was using the police as a surrogate to replace Barry’s father, who had wisely run away, as Deputy Nick had once surmised.
Barry Davis was reported missing by his pain in the ass mother on the morning of the Fourth of July. If Kelley was going to have a friend, a boyfriend, whatever, it was going to be Barry Davis. Why? Because they both faded into the scenery. Two of a kind.
“Holy shit,” Danny said aloud. If Danny was right, and she felt sure she was, Kelley would have waited in Potter. Would they have remained there while the crisis spun out of control?
Danny realized she once again had no idea. And now she was imagining the interceptor’s engine was beginning to miss. Was she about to run out of gas in the desert? Danny checked her wrist for the tenth time that morning, and for the tenth time noted that her watch was gone. It had probably been pulled off by one of the undead.
Danny caught herself making plans for what she and Kelley would do after they were united again. She was dreaming. That was the worst thing she could do. Always think methodically. First, fit the facts together. Then fill in between them with the most likely hypothesis. After that, the educated guess. Maybe flip a coin. But never, ever hope. Because hope clouded the whole chain of reasoning, all the way up to the top. The moment you started in with that, you were limiting the outcomes to the ones you wanted. And that very seldom happened. Not in this life.
