by Ben Tripp
Danny needed to remain absolutely clear about the hypothesis she was building, untainted by hopes that it might turn out better than expected, because this was probably going to go down the hard way. If Danny did find the Mustang, and Kelley was with it, she still had to face the three possible scenarios: Kelley alive…Kelley dead…Kelley undead.
The engine starved a half-mile outside Potter.
Danny walked to town in the broiling morning heat, the shotgun in one hand and the prybar in the other. This was a king-sized fuckup. If Potter had been hit by the disaster—and the total radio silence suggested it had—there could be twice as many zombies there as there had been in Forest Peak. Maybe a lot more, if a steady stream of refugees had reached it before the death got that far.
Danny’s boots scuffed on the road, and she saw that sand was beginning to blow over the paved surface, softening its edges. There was no traffic to sweep the road clean. At this rate, it would be buried in a couple of months. For the first time, Danny saw trash on the side of the road and didn’t think of it as litter. She saw it as evidence of life. There was a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrapper nestled at the foot of a creosote bush, and a plastic Jack in the Box cup a few yards further along. The cup still had the lid on it, and there was a straw stuck through the lid. Someone ate the one, someone drank the other, and they chucked them out of a car window, and now they were probably dead.
Danny was letting her thoughts wander when she heard the crows.
And not only crows, but vultures.
She didn’t need a filling station. The traffic lights were dark, so there wasn’t any power in town. That meant the gas pumps wouldn’t be working. She had a coil of garden hose over her shoulder and a couple of empty plastic jugs. What Danny needed now was a vehicle with gas in it.
Potter was laid out at the bottom of a hill. The edge of town was defined by railroad tracks running north and south, dividing the town from the empty landscape beyond: a baking-hot plain of white, salt ground. An ocean floor, some million years ago. Danny walked down the road into Potter, keeping to the center line, then headed down the hill toward the tracks across an area largely devoid of vegetation.
She crossed a plot of land that had once, long ago, been a miniature golf course. A little green pigment still clung to the amoeba-shaped cement islands with their crumbling windmills and castles and lawn sculptures. She could make out the foundations of the clubhouse restaurant that had once stood there. It had burned down when Danny was small, before Kelley was born. But the miniature golf course hadn’t been operating in Danny’s lifetime. All that remained vital of the original place were some palm trees that had once lined the parking lot. Otherwise it was difficult to tell what had ever stood there.
Would the whole town of Potter look like that in twenty years, or would humanity have moved back in? Danny didn’t see why they would bother, but somebody must have loved this town.
She reached the hard, white silt of the saline valley floor. The train tracks ran along a few hundred yards away. Danny crossed to them, her boots crunching in the arid dirt.
The tracks were laid on a raised bed of clinker stone, and Danny saw that the once-bright rails were already dim with rust. She thought water was required for anything to rust, but then again, the hot rails cooling at night would probably attract dew. Danny walked along the rails, stepping between the thickly tarred wooden ties. She still felt sore from the action in Forest Peak, with Technicolor bruises all over her limbs, but felt like she could run if she had to. Like she could fight if she had to. She just wasn’t sure how long she’d last.
The vultures circled in the blue sky. Flights of crows would abruptly leap into the air and circle from one perch to another, croaking and jockeying for position. Danny wondered if they were responding to a threat on the ground, or simply following the witless reactionary groupthink of birds, the way pigeons and geese did. But Amy had said crows were the smartest bird. In that case, they were probably playing keep-away from the zombies. She assumed zombies would eat anything they could find, not just men. This will give the crows a break, she thought, and then she saw the train.
It was not an ordinary train. Almost the entire thing was painted in a camouflage scheme of swarming squares in tan, black, and gray, one of the digitally generated designs calculated for maximum visual disruption. But it wasn’t one of the military service patterns, at least not one with which she was familiar. The rearmost car, the one she saw first, had a crew cabin at the back and a flatcar section forward; chained to the flatcar was an M3A3 Bradley fighting vehicle. Tanklike in appearance, designed as a troop transport and a tank-killer, this one sported a medium machine gun, a 25mm chain gun capable of delivering two hundred rounds per minute, and an antitank missile launcher. Danny knew it well. She had almost died in a similar specimen.
What this thing was doing in Potter, California, instead of in one of the several theaters of war where the troops were desperately undersupplied with functional gear, Danny could not imagine. It wasn’t an ideal fighting vehicle. Although armored, its skin was aluminum: It sacrificed strength for speed. But in a typical civilian environment, the thing would be unstoppable.
She wondered what had stopped it.
Danny walked away from the tracks, out into the desert, keeping well clear of the train. She didn’t think anyone was aboard; there were crows sitting on the barrel of the chain gun and walking along the top of the train cars ahead. There were two camouflaged troop-transport cars in front of the flatcar, then five ordinary civilian passenger cars in assorted livery. These were the only parts of the train not freshly painted in camo. Ahead of that was another flatcar covered in a tied-down rubberized tarpaulin; Danny thought she recognized the outlines of a couple of Humvees under it. An odd detail was a machine gun mounted on the flatcar, facing the civilian cars. Ahead of that was a sealed container car, and ahead of that was the engine. There were some serial numbers stenciled on the engine, but they meant nothing to Danny.
The train had pulled up to the station, she could see that much. But she couldn’t tell what had happened after that. Maybe they were on maneuvers, killing zombies, clearing the town. But if that was so, why were the fighting vehicles still on the train? Danny would sure as hell have preferred to be inside one of those against a foe armed only with jaws. Had they abandoned the train, or left it behind for some future purpose? There was a coat of dust all over the top surfaces, which suggested it had been there for at least a couple of days.
Danny felt the sun baking down on her, and Kelley’s fate receding into the distance, and the urgent need for action overcame her caution in the face of such a strange discovery. It was time to get moving, whatever had happened here. Maybe there was a platoon of heavily armed men on the other side of town. Her shirt under the coil of hose was streaming with sweat, and her muscles were beginning to ache from holding the thing in place.
Danny circled around to the front of the train, crossing the tracks about fifty feet ahead of the engine. She smelled it, then, faint but unmistakable. Death. She moved along until she could see the space between the train and the platform.
There was a mass of corpses. It filled the gap like an avalanche.
She worked her way closer, trying to be silent. There was a sound, something like radio static. She kept the bulk of the train between herself and the undead, as they probably were, piled up against the bogeys. A couple of crows took flight. A vulture spread its wings on a rooftop up in town, cooling itself off. It appeared to be praying to the sun.
Nothing else moved. The noise was getting louder with each step, and now the full stench hit Danny’s nostrils and poisoned her mouth.
They weren’t zombies. They were corpses. And they were swarming with legions of flies.
Danny unhitched the compact binoculars from her belt and swept them over the heap of rotting bodies. There were at least two hundred, and probably considerably more. They were full of meaty craters, suggestive of gunfire.
D
anny put the binoculars away and moved toward the embankment at the end of the station building, keeping low until she could see down the length of the platform. There were piles of bodies there, as well, some of them torn apart with limbs flung a dozen feet from the nearest torsos. She could see a heavy female corpse with its belly blown open. It looked very much like a hand grenade injury.
Danny moved down the platform, keeping her back to the station building until there were windows. Then she split the difference between the embankment and the building, so she wouldn’t have to deal with an arm reaching through the broken panes to grab her. But nothing stirred except the crows. There had been a massacre here—of zombies, not men. The men who did it were also gone, but Danny couldn’t guess where. She was definitely looking at a pitched battle, though. There were bullet scars all over the place, evidence they’d been shooting wild.
A further clue to recent events presented itself on the platform side of the train. The tarpaulin over the flatcar was spattered with blood in irregular, looping lines. The blood was dark red, turned to varnish by the sun, but unmistakably human. That was arterial spray from someone stumbling around on the flatcar itself. Maybe the victim got shot or bitten. Either way, the injury told Danny there had been living casualties at the train. That meant they had been driven back to it, or driven away from it. Driven away was Danny’s guess. Otherwise, why would the train still be in the station, laden with fighting machines?
She found a corpse wearing military boots and the same digital camouflage as the train. The young man’s throat was torn out. Brass shell casings littered the ground around him. Whoever had mounted the defense had not been able to retrieve their dead from the field. There might not have been any left alive.
Danny realized there were flies crawling all over her exposed skin. She waved them off, and they immediately settled back down on her. The overpowering reek of corpses was making her throat burn. She needed to get away from here. She moved toward the embankment and paused. No signs of zombies, no moaning or stirring among the corpses. So far, so good. Danny scrambled up the embankment, using the white rocks that spelled out the letter R in POTTER as stepping stones. Then she was up against a wooden fence at the top of the slope that ran along behind the hotel. There was a gate with concrete steps down at the far end of the fence, but Danny went the other way, where the fence ended at an empty lot and some dumpsters.
Still no zombie activity. It felt like every deserted battlefield she’d seen.
The parking lot was at the other end of the hotel near the steps, but Danny didn’t want to approach it from the desert side. She wanted to come around the front of the hotel, so she could have a look at the street and find out what the hell happened here. It seemed like it might be important. If refugees had fled Potter, or some kind of military action had killed them (killed Kelley, for example, the voice in her head remarked), she needed to know. It was vital to the bigger-picture effort of finding her sister.
The street was thick with dust. The buildings created a natural funnel for the desert wind that blew up from the saline flats, and thick clouds of pale, sandy powder had settled over everything. There was no color. The dust obscured it. There were heaped shapes of bodies all along the sidewalks and against the many cars skewed in the street, some with open doors, some with bullet holes in the windshields. Danny could see hundreds of bodies from her position halfway down the block by the hotel, and there would be more on every street. Crows were picking at some of them, but not all. Danny suspected she was not alone here, although she was probably the only living human.
She knelt, keeping her head up, and picked up an empty shoe that lay on the pavement. Never break eye contact with your surroundings. She saw four corpses at which crows were picking a few yards away, and three they left alone. She took aim at one of the bodies the crows were avoiding. The shoe whirled through the air and came down with a clump against the leg of a body lying at the curb opposite the hotel.
Nothing happened. At first. Then, as Danny was about to move forward, the thing shifted its weight.
She saw the head turn, as if on rusty bearings. It was one of them, and it sought the source of the disturbance. When it saw nothing, it settled back down and became part of the gruesome scenery again.
Danny realized the street was a mistake. She would be better off taking a route through the hotel. If the zombies were in some kind of suspended animation right now, it wouldn’t last. However they did it, they would sense her, as the ones in Agua Rojo had done.
She went in through the kitchen door by the hotel’s dumpsters, and almost immediately found another zombie. It had been slumped against the walk-in freezer, at the end of the central aisle lined with cooktops and fryers. A Hispanic male, dressed in cook whites and black check pants. The fabric was stained and slimy at armpits and crotch. The zombie began to move a few seconds after Danny entered the room. There was a two-foot rolling pin made of marble in a rack only a yard from her hand. Long before the zombie had gained its feet, Danny snatched up the rolling pin, then crushed the monster’s skull with a single overhand stroke, caving in the tall white chef’s hat. Black fluid poured out of the hat and spattered the white uniform.
Aiming a second blow with the rolling pin, Danny dropped the coiled hose and the plastic jugs. She gathered them back up in a messy bundle and moved deeper into the hotel, gripping the rolling pin. She might keep it. It was better than a baseball bat.
The hotel was silent. There were too many doors for safety. Sidling past each doorway, ready to strike, she found an elderly female sitting in an office down the hall beyond the kitchen. Her hair was white, knotted atop her head, and she wore an old-fashioned black dress with a high collar. When Danny moved into the doorway, the old woman looked up. The eyes were dead.
The undead thing rose to its feet, taking halting steps toward Danny. She considered smashing its head the way she’d done to the cook—but instead, Danny simply closed the office door. The old zombie scratched at the other side of the wood, but it didn’t have the wit to operate the doorknob.
There was a dining room beyond the office, in which Danny found a plump female zombie that had once been dark-skinned, but was now an eerie gunmetal color. It was dressed in some kind of aproned pink outfit, maybe a chambermaid. There was no door to close, here. Danny would have to kill this one. She put down the jugs and the hose and broke eye contact with the walking corpse. When she looked up again, it was shockingly close to her. It came at Danny with a speed she hadn’t reckoned on.
She struck it haphazardly across the face with the rolling pin, knocking the nose and jaw profoundly out of alignment. The creature stopped, but only to reorient itself to Danny’s position. Its fat hands whipped out at her. Danny swung the rolling pin again, and this time one of the zombie’s slack, jowled arms came up in a distinct gesture of self-defense. The bones cracked, and the hand flopped loosely around at the end of the arm. Unfazed, it renewed the attack. Panic surged up inside Danny’s chest.
The thing’s broken jaw worked up and down, the lower teeth so dislocated they waved out of the side of the face. Danny whacked it again, this time straight down on top of the head. The chambermaid collapsed, vomiting one long spurt of black liquid at her boots, then was still.
Danny’s heart was pounding. This zombie was fast—faster than any of the ones she had seen so far.
The adrenaline kicked her thinking into gear. There were more capable zombies out there. Maybe it was because this one had been indoors, not rotting in the sun. It was still slower than even the dullest human being, but this one could move. Maybe some of the undead were faster than usual, the infection or chemical or whatever it was working differently on their nervous systems. Danny would have to factor that into her plans. Even here in Potter, she would have to amend her approach: She didn’t want to find herself surrounded if they could react with the speed of this one.
Danny was still formulating a fresh plan when a hand fell stiffly on her shoulder.
<
br /> Raw fear jetted into her system and she spun free, the rolling pin already coming up—it was the old woman from the office. Behind it the office door stood open. She wasn’t any faster than the others. But she had opened that door.
Danny clipped the old thing in the mouth with the rolling pin on the upswing, then clubbed the white-haired head to the floor on the return stroke. The thin arms reached for her, even as the creature fell. The scars on Danny’s back prickled and itched with the sudden injection of fear. Danny stomped once, hard, on the wrinkled, sunken face. The skull broke beneath her foot like a china teapot wrapped in rags. The thing shuddered and went still. Danny felt growing terror, and she forced it to subside. Terror led to panic, and panic killed.
There were French doors at the rear of the dining room. They opened on to a patio at the back of the hotel. The patio ended in a low, gated iron fence, and beyond that was the parking lot. Danny moved swiftly. Beyond the fence was space for thirty or forty cars. The lot was full. The entire scene, from the hedges around the parking area, to the buildings, the paving, and the cars, was entirely floured in pale dust. There were bodies here, as well. Danny could see the head and shoulders of a corpse or zombie propped up inside a Jeep with a rag top and no doors. Was that only rotting tissue, or was it a threat? There were more of them on the ground, all around. One was an infant. They were motionless, but no crows had ventured into the enclosed yard. Several birds were perched on wires overhead, but none had settled in the parking area.
Danny was at the French doors now, crouching. She pulled the hose off her shoulder and uncoiled it. It was much too long. She had intended to siphon two gas tanks at once, but she would never have time. She cut the hose five feet from one end. That would be enough. She checked the action of the shotgun. There were too many things to carry. The rolling pin would have to stay behind.
There was a minivan near the patio gate. It might offer some cover for Danny while she sucked the gas through the pipe. After that, the siphoning action would work on its own, and she could keep moving around the lot if she had to. Gravity would take care of the rest. Even if a dozen zombies were coming for her, as long as she could eventually make it back around to the jug and run away with it, her mission was accomplished. A gallon of gas was enough to get her somewhere safer. But the minivan would also obscure her view.
