by Ben Tripp
Kaufman made a noise of contempt in his throat.
“Those pricks don’t do shit. They’re in charge, and nobody else. They have some kind of agenda, and we’re trying to figure out what the fuck it is. So-called leadership is shitting a brick up there in the Pyramid.”
“I met the senator today,” Danny said.
“She say anything useful?”
“She doesn’t know shit,” Danny said.
“So to put things in perspective, you went up to the thirty-third floor, am I right?” Kaufman said. “To meet the highest-ranking civilian in town. And yet—the Pyramid is forty-eight floors, you know. Those Hawkstone Shutzstaffel have the top.”
They climbed into a liver-colored Astrovan and Kaufman slid the door shut behind them. Somebody in the backseat passed Danny a deer rifle and a utility knife. The man in the passenger seat handed her one of those solidstate flashlights that are supposed to last a lifetime but get lost in a couple of months.
“Welcome to the zone,” the man said, and turned around to look out the windshield as they rolled toward the perimeter.
Danny marched with the rest, shining the weak flashlight into every shadow, every angle in the architecture. Kaufman said the entire area had been cleared of zeros. When was the last time they checked? Although the street was empty, there were hundreds of people huddled indoors. Apparently minimum occupancy was ten to a room, at this point. The office building with its three-to-a-cubicle population represented elite status. There were no lights inside the windows, no voices, no music drifting out. There was a whiff of human excrement in the air, even outside, even with the stench of the fires. Indoors must have been unbearable.
The curfew under which these people were living was even harsher than the lockdowns in Iraq that Danny had participated in. Because of the zombies. Absolute silence, absolute darkness was required. Hide like rabbits, day and night. It was a stupid arrangement, Danny thought. All this manpower locked up and doing nothing. They needed to make downtown into a fortress, not a prison. They needed something to do. They needed to participate in their own defense. It could only be a matter of time, and not much of that, before the zeros got through. Then all these buildings crammed with people would become enormous meat lockers.
It was three in the morning and Danny had made two circuits around the block, besides standing guard on east and south sides while others in her team did the patrolling. Now and then she would see the flicker of a candle or flashlight in one of the windows of the apartment buildings of which her territory was comprised. There was no power for the street lights, but the fires half a mile away cast a red glow over everything, reflected in the clouds of smoke. No stars, no moon. The smoke obscured everything. Shadows seemed deeper and darker, tinged a velvety purple. The street-level frontages were shops, mostly; Danny could see vague shapes of people inside, sleeping in rows on the floor between the display racks and merchandise. Danny could not imagine sleeping in such an exposed situation. Then again, she didn’t sleep much anyway.
With nothing to do but stand guard or walk the block, her thoughts circled around in the same way, always returning to the same points, searching for an analysis that would suggest her next line of action. She wasn’t drinking, so her mind was clear. This was not an advantage. It meant she couldn’t stifle the thoughts that swarmed like bats and distracted her from her reasoning. She considered the strange interview with the senator. Paranoid? Sheltered? What the hell had it all meant? Danny felt as if she’d been brought in mainly to give Senator Anka a distraction, not to offer information.
The politician might have been famous, and she might once have been powerful, but right now she was more like some kind of sideshow. At least that’s how it seemed to Danny. She remembered how the woman had reacted when Danny observed that the helicopter didn’t have a roof to land on in her building. It must have been what the mercenaries promised her: Keep up the good work, act like a leader, and when the city falls beneath the teeth of the undead, we’ll give you a lift in our helicopter. Only you’ll have to brave the zeros swarming the streets if you want to get to the helicopter, because we put you in a pointed building with no landing place on top.
The weird thing was, anybody could have figured it out. Danny was pretty sure everyone but Anka already knew it. The Great Woman was so sheltered she had stopped thinking for herself. Or she actually believed she was going to be safe in her tower indefinitely.
How did this affect Danny’s plans? It meant there was no working government, not in California, not (if the senator was right) in America. There was no organized resistance. So moving forward, Danny was going to have to work with the next-biggest bully. That probably meant Hawkstone right now, and after that, whatever military units coordinated a defense and started taking command. The only problem was, she hated the mercenary system and all the assholes in it. She had dealt with men like that during her tours of duty. They were sociopath cowboys, overpaid and undertrained. Ex-military men or ex-cops, mostly. Addicted to fast money, adrenaline, testosterone, gunpowder, and usually crank. Now they were doubly amped up because they were in danger at home, not in some desert on the ass-end of the world.
So the first line of reckoning was what to do about staying out of human-generated trouble until she found Kelley. The second issue to think about was how to accomplish the task itself.
Kelley was either somewhere, or she was dead. America was a big place, zombies or no zombies. In the days since Kelley left her note and fled the Adelman household, she could have gotten to the East Coast, Alaska, Panama, or for that matter anywhere in the world, if she bought a plane ticket. And if the world hadn’t chosen that particular moment to end.
As it was, Danny knew that Kelley had not taken the Mustang any farther than Potter. For some reason, she’d put the keys up under the sun visor and walked away. That suggested (if she hadn’t just walked away to take a bathroom break, and never returned) that Kelley either met her boyfriend, presumably Barry Davis, with the plan of taking his ride the rest of the way to their destination, or they were meeting up with the intention of taking a train in Potter. But Danny didn’t have the crucial timeline of events. It was also possible the two of them got that far when the crisis broke out, the mercenaries gunned them down, and Danny had missed seeing Kelley’s rotting corpse in the mountain of them dumped by the railroad tracks. Maybe she had walked away from the car at gunpoint.
Danny worked the problem from every angle, fitting her meager store of facts together on all sides, at every angle, trying to find a match. Nothing so far. Did her jacket on the passenger seat of the Mustang mean Kelley had traveled alone? Did Kelley wear it out of the house and leave it behind? Did it matter? Danny didn’t even know what was relevant. Maybe Kelley drove the car to Potter, set off on foot, and was halfway to Nevada with a backpack full of trail mix, completely unaware of the disaster. Maybe Kelley died back in Riverton, where Danny met Topper and Ernie. Somebody killed her and jumped into the gassed-up Mustang and drove to Potter because it was the next big place to go. There were too many possible outcomes. All of them included the random chance of being savaged by an undead cannibal.
It was all too much. Danny walked the beat and thought and argued with herself and came up with nothing.
There was another issue that claimed her attention, the concern that hung over all the rest: Kelley or no Kelley, what next?
It was not too much to say that the end of the world had arrived. Not the comic-book End Times as described by the evangelicals, a great big biblical special-effects extravaganza with asteroids and hellfire and Death on a Pale Horse: There was no righteous Creator overseeing this crisis. No mercy, no meaning, and there were no chosen people. People of every faith, atheists, sinners, and saints, they were all among the reanimated dead walking the earth, in search of flesh to tear from the limbs of the living. The end of the world was here, and as always—like all the rest of the end-of-the-world calamities mankind had survived—it was up to the unimaginati
ve, fighting, enduring types, like Danny (for so she considered herself), to pick up the pieces and carry on. The ones that got wiped out were the interesting people.
So what next? Was it going to be six months of waiting for the zeros to rot off their own bones, to decay until they could no longer attack? Or did the living flesh they consumed keep them going, arrest the processes of death? For all Danny knew, they were now immortal unless destroyed. The chef in the hotel kitchen back in Potter had huge, stinking stains under his arms and at his crotch. Was that rotten sweat and shit, or was he starting to decompose? Jesus, Danny thought. Even to think this stuff is insane. Now I’m making plans around it.
But there had to be something beyond the current mission. A bigger game plan. Danny could only think of two ideas. The first was obvious. Find a cure, an antidote. Something to wipe the zombies out. Something to stop the virus, to immunize the living against infection. That wasn’t something she could do, of course. But she could help others to do it. Senator Anka had said there were scientists working on it, right here in the city.
Danny didn’t think they would be doing it there much longer: Even with the distant boom of the fires, she could hear moaning out there in the night. It was only a matter of time before the defenses fell; she herself was going to be as far from the city as possible when that moment arrived, regardless of what anybody else had in mind.
Another option wasn’t obvious to Danny at all, because it went against the way she thought and acted. But there wasn’t anything else viable to do. Get back to her little tribe of people at Boscombe Field, maybe pick up some others along the way, and find a safe place to wait out the storm. Live off the land. Hunt and grow seeds into crops. Hell, Amy could raise rabbits and pigs and horses and maybe Danny could eventually convince her to let them eat a few. Danny had a good cross-section of talents among them: Topper and Ernie knew machines. They could work metal. They could handle tools as well as weapons.
Troy knew what to do in an emergency. In his way he was as capable as Danny herself, if not as seasoned by adverse experience. Wulf was a hunter, a tracker. A survivor. Amy was also a doctor, if they needed one. The Mexican woman, Maria, was a born accomplisher, somebody who did things without being asked and didn’t stop until a thing was done. Patrick could remind them not to descend into barbarism. There was the quiet baby and blue-haired Michelle and her brother Jimmy James, who represented the future.
Others had value, too. Danny didn’t really know them. Some of the faces she could only barely conjure in her mind. She’d been away from them as long as she’d been with them, now. They were all a resource to be used for survival. Not only a resource, though—it didn’t sit right in Danny’s mind to think of them that way, although that was her first instinct. More than that, they were her people. They were in this thing with her. And once she admitted that, she knew she had let them down. She had put her personal crusade first, when none of them had done the same. They all had families, loved ones, friends. Were they any less sisters or brothers than Danny?
The answer to that question hurt. They were more so than Danny. That’s why she had left them behind to search for her sister: To Kelley, she was less family, less loved one, less friend. The farewell note was engraved in her memory, verbatim. It ached unbearably, cut into her soul one word at a time. Now, just a few days too late, she was trying to make amends to the sister she’d let down for most of her life. But in doing so, she had let the others down, abandoned them.
Danny was grappling with ideas of a kind she’d never had to deal with before. It scared her. This was the stuff she’d been running from all her life, and if she stopped running now, it would mean she’d been wrong all those years. Her motto had always been I can handle this. If she fell back on a bunch of incompetent civilians, she wasn’t stronger. She was weaker.
What she’d never considered was the idea that “stronger” wasn’t the only virtue. There were other things. Being a good friend, maybe. Not only being close to people, but needing them. She’d always thought of that as a weakness, but it was also a strength.
And Kelley—what did Danny even need her for? Maybe hope. Maybe atonement. Maybe she simply loved her, and that was all there was to it.
Soon she would have to go back. This whole junket to San Francisco was a terrible sidetrack, and now she was hooked into some kind of poorly run, counterproductive system even less effective than the theaters of war she’d been in overseas. This is getting to be a habit with me, she thought. Seeking out disasters to be part of. Like she had to find situations where her somewhat brutal talents would be needed. Danny knew, down inside herself where she seldom ventured to explore, that something had now changed. Even if Amy and all the others didn’t need her, and were prospering at the airfield, the fact remained: She needed them.
3
The dawn after Danny slipped away in the night, it was Maria who discovered her absence.
Maria was up early, as was her habit. The sun was below the horizon, washing the sky behind the mountains with pale pastel colors. Maria had been sleeping on a folding cot by the radio. Now she said a brief prayer to the God she wasn’t so sure she understood anymore. Then she went downstairs and looked into the office, where she saw the empty couch with a blanket rumpled up on it. The red-haired renegada sheriff lady wasn’t in there. Not surprising: She hardly ever slept. Probably patrolling the fence.
Maria went outside into the cool, dewy air and breathed in the freshness of it before the sun could rise and bake it dry. On her way back into the tower, she saw a piece of paper, folded double and taped to the glass door. She hadn’t noticed it on the way out. The paper had “FOR AMY” written on it in big block letters. Maria opened it, and read:
Amy: Keep them here. Back with Kelley.
Danny.
Maria knew who Kelley was, because Amy had told her about Danny’s personal troubles, and the long, bitter note Kelley had written. But at first Maria didn’t understand. Keep who here? Herself and the others? Did Danny know where Kelley was? How long would it take to get her, a day? A week?
Before she even knew she was on the move, Maria found herself shaking Amy awake in the dormitory of the terminal. Amy drifted up from an exhausted sleep, eyes rolling, mumbling. Some of the others woke up; the boy Jimmy James sat up in his top bunk and watched them with wary eyes that looked too old for his face. Maria thrust the note into Amy’s hands.
“Scrambled, with rye toast, dry,” Amy said, and blinked, and looked at Maria’s tense face. Then the note. She woke up in a hurry.
“God darnit, Danny,” she said. “You big dumbhead.”
It was time to prepare for a long stay at the airfield. Amy didn’t know how long they would need to remain there, and she didn’t know how long Danny would be gone—if she even planned to return. Amy swore Maria to silence regarding the contents of the note; it wasn’t that the note itself contained anything incriminating, but rather that it contained so little.
She called a general meeting and told the others that Danny was on a mission, and there was nothing to worry about. “I think you all know by now she’s a lone wolf type,” Amy said, “and she always comes back. She’ll probably bring the cavalry with her.”
Nobody seemed to be worried. Except Patrick, but he didn’t say anything. He could read Amy. That made her nervous. She knew herself to be highly legible, to the right person. The boy Jimmy James was another one. He knew something was up. But he also kept his silence, although that was more due to his nature than to an awareness of a need for discretion. So Amy bluffed her way through it, some twenty or twenty-five faces turned in her direction looking as if they believed her and were interested in what she had to say, to varying degrees.
“These jobs are things Danny suggested to me,” Amy lied, “things we can do while she’s gone. She says they’re, um, vital efforts to ensure our, um, long-term viability. In those words pretty much.”
“Sheriff don’t want to do the manual labor,” Topper complained.<
br />
Think anything you want, was Amy’s fervent wish. Just don’t think too hard.
The first project she’d come up with was a simple matter of efficiency. The airfield had a finite supply of water, and so far they had used it with abandon. Now it was time to start conserving the stuff. That meant arranging some long-drop toilet facilities. At seven gallons a flush, they needed to start crapping in a hole. There was a general groan of dismay at this, but these people were all from the Southland. They knew about water shortages. Simon the accountant raised his hand: “I guess we can’t wash the driveway with a hose, either,” he said. That got a laugh. Mostly from Amy, who was on the verge of hysteria.
Amy gave Topper and Ernie the task of figuring out where the drainpipes went, and diverting the bathing and washing water so it could be collected. She wasn’t sure what they were collecting it for, but that’s what they seemed to do in the magazine articles on resource conservation she never quite got around to properly reading. Maybe they could grow their own corn with it, someday. Primarily it was an unpleasant, demanding job that would keep the restless bikers occupied for a couple of days. That was something Danny had explained to Amy a while back: Leadership is the act of causing other people to invest themselves in difficult work. You can’t go easy on people and lead them at the same time. If you go easy on them, they will either self-destruct or find a different leader. Human nature, Danny would say. Fucking ridiculous. And then she’d pour herself another shot.
Leadership didn’t come naturally to Amy. People didn’t come naturally to her. She was going to have to figure it out until Danny got back, assuming she did, assuming she didn’t get all dead and start chomping around. Amy’s plan was simple: Do what Danny would do. Except, of course, the part where she took off and left everybody behind.
