by Ben Tripp
The second project was simpler, and Troy Huppert was happy to lead the effort. He took a team of ten people around the entire perimeter fence, looking for places that required reinforcement. Then they set to work building up those weak spots. There weren’t many, but, as Troy said, it only took one.
Those two zombies moved slowly along the fence, hooking their gray fingers through the wire, always trying to get close to the living that were at work on the other side of the mesh. The small girl’s empty sleeve of torn skin swayed as she moved. It was sickening to look at, but nobody went for long without glancing at the undead that yearned to get among them. The consensus was that these two zombies should be dispatched very soon. It was too much to handle, having them watching.
For the remaining people in the assembly, Amy concocted minor jobs: cleaning, stock taking of food and supplies, simple maintenance. Patrick was in charge of this cluster of tasks, and obviously grateful for something to do. They might be here another couple of days, or it might be six months. Amy wanted to proceed under the latter assumption. That meant knowing exactly what they had to work with, and taking care of it. This didn’t require visualizing what Danny would do: As a country veterinarian, Amy knew all about conservation and maintenance of supplies. Her business lived by the careful shepherding of expensive materials for as long as they would last, juggling availability with expiration dates.
Maria stayed up in the tower with the radio. Ernie posted watch. Amy realized there was only one person who didn’t know what to do that day: herself.
After a brief inspection of Topper and Ernie’s trench-digging efforts, which had yielded several lengths of old rust-furred iron pipe, Amy decided she might be well employed watching the road for any sign of Danny’s return. So she sat herself on the bumper of one of the minnows, a pickup truck with a fiberglass cap, and kept her eye on the ribbon of asphalt that wiggled away through the scrub desert.
She sat there for half an hour before she realized she could see something approaching. It was a cloud of dust. At first she thought it was a dust devil, one of those tiny cyclones that whirled up off the sand and threw litter around before blowing itself out.
But this one didn’t blow out. It grew.
Eventually Amy could see the dark ciphers of vehicles emerging from the horizon, growing as they approached. Three or four of them. Then Amy found Wulf at her elbow. He was also watching, his rumpled eyes squinting into the hard light.
“I guess we shouldn’t have counted on staying alone out here,” Amy said.
“Military,” Wulf said.
“You can’t tell that from here.”
“They’re spaced out perfect. Hundred meters each. It’s a convoy. Xin chao, Doc. I’m outta here,” he said, and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He shambled over to the nearest hangar and emerged a few moments later with a child’s nylon backpack. It had a unicorn embroidered on it.
“You’ve been waiting for this,” Amy protested. “You’re just like Danny. You can’t wait to let everybody down.”
“Didn’t make no fuckin’ promises to nobody,” Wulf muttered. “Keys.”
Amy had the key to the new padlock that held the gates shut. She let Wulf out without further discussion, knowing there was none to be had. He really was a lot like Danny, obstinate and alone. Wulf didn’t walk down the road, but disappeared with surprising speed into the rutted landscape uphill of the airfield. Amy felt a little tickle of fear in the back of her belly. Those vehicles approaching represented change. A new situation. Amy was sick of new situations. At the time she wouldn’t have thought of this as a premonition. Later, she would describe it exactly that way.
There were three vehicles, a pair of military Humvees with the deep, buttressed suspensions that gave them impossible ground clearance; both had .50 caliber machine guns mounted on the roofs. Behind them was a hulking machine that Amy thought looked like a tank on wheels instead of treads, its turret bristling with weapons. All three vehicles were painted in an angular black-and-gray camouflage pattern Amy didn’t remember seeing before. Danny would have recognized it.
The word HAWKSTONE was lettered discreetly on the cab doors of the vehicles, accented with a logo: a simplified eagle’s head over an American flag. Amy guessed this meant they were some kind of private outfit, but for all she knew there was a Hawkstone branch of the Marines or something. Big Red One, Screaming Eagles, and all that fierce-sounding stuff Danny was into. A stocky man wearing the same camouflage as the vehicles sprang out of the lead Humvee almost before it stopped moving. He came right up to the gates and banged on the metal frame with a fancy assault weapon, as if Amy and the half-dozen others now gathered behind the gates couldn’t see him.
“Hi,” Amy said, aware it might sound somewhat lame.
“Open up on the double,” the man said, and waved at his companions in the second Humvee. Two men climbed down from the cargo area in back, carrying a third man between them in a fireman’s lift. The third man’s leg was saturated with blood streaming from the thigh, and he looked pale and ill.
Topper came right up to the gate and squared off in front of the man with the gun. “What’s your business?” he said.
“We got wounded,” the stocky man replied.
“I see that. And you’re waving a gun around.”
“Open the fucking gates,” the man said, and Amy stepped between them and released the padlock.
There was a great bustle of activity as the wounded man was carried into the terminal building and laid out on the Ping-Pong table in the rec room, his head propped up on a greasy old sofa cushion, a hastily stripped bedsheet beneath him. Everyone who wasn’t helping was watching, so it seemed almost incidental that the two Humvees and the big, tanklike vehicle, an M1117 ASV, rolled through the gates and took up prominent positions in the center of the airfield parking lot. Their noses were pointed in an arc outward, tail-to-tail, creating a defensible center and a comprehensive field of fire—but not out at the desert. Inward, toward the airfield.
The new arrivals moved with such purpose that it wasn’t questioned. Patrick returned from the motor home with the big duffel bag of medical supplies they’d accumulated, only to find himself having to ask permission to enter the terminal building from a pair of muscular, uniformed men holding machine guns across their chests.
He knew instantly that everything had changed. The problem wasn’t just zombies anymore.
Amy tried to remember how many of these people knew she wasn’t a doctor. The short, stocky guy in uniform was addressed as “Murdo” he was clearly in charge. Head like a fist, fringed with dense, black hair, balding in back to reveal an almost perfectly round cap of gleaming scalp.
These must be guys like the mercenaries Danny complained about dealing with in Iraq—hotshots with fancy guns and no particular allegiance to the Geneva Conventions.
Murdo called the huge men that flanked him Reese and Boudreau. Boudreau had to be six-five, his nose broken more than once so it tapered the wrong way—getting broader and more prominent between his eyes, almost flat above his mouth. Reese had no fat on him, not a spare scrap of flesh: His anatomy showed through the skin like steel cables on an iron frame.
The wounded man’s name was Jones, because Murdo kept repeating that “Jones fucked us,” when he wasn’t shouting at people to get back or telling his men to secure their position.
Amy hadn’t intended to volunteer her medical services, but several of the civilians she’d been traveling with pointed her out to Murdo and said she was a doctor. Amy regretted that particular subterfuge. Troy wasn’t there to disagree, because he had been marched away along with Topper, Ernie, and a couple of other men who looked physically capable. Where they were now, Amy did not know. Their guard was Parker, a black man with a massive neck wider than his head.
She had never explained to these others that she was only a veterinarian. It wouldn’t be good for morale: hers or theirs. She still had an inferiority complex when it came to human doctor
s. Now she wished very much that she hadn’t let the matter slide.
Murdo pounded on the table. “You!” he barked at Amy. “Jones here needs some repairs. So let’s get going with it.”
Now was the time to come clean, Amy knew, before this went any further. If she messed up and lost this poor kid with the bullet in his leg, there would be heck to pay. If she told them all what she really was, they couldn’t possibly make her operate. Patrick knew her secret, as well; surely he would say something. Everyone was crowding in, the men with guns and the civilians both, pressing close, caught up in the panic. Jones was wailing with pain.
“Listen to me,” Amy said. “I’m not—”
A deafening noise threw everybody down on the floor except the men in uniform. The air went rank with cordite stink. Bent-nosed Boudreau had fired a bullet into the ceiling. The shell casing jingled on the linoleum.
“There’s no time for this shit,” Murdo said. “You all keep the fuck back and let the little lady do her thing.”
The others did what he said, wet-eyed and afraid.
Amy looked at Jones. His skin was pale, like beeswax. He was sweating. His mouth was contorted with pain. Amy visualized a horse in the same situation. That didn’t work. A dog? More like it. This was not a man—it was a dog with very straight back legs. It had an injured limb, and Amy had to repair it. Same basic hydraulics, same structures. Different response to anesthetics, but she didn’t have any animal tranquilizers, so it was hard to go wrong there.
“Patrick, you’re my assistant. We need to wash up, and then let’s get to work.”
A minute later they were scrubbing their hands in the men’s room, hissing at each other in urgent whispers.
“I can’t do this—the sight of blood makes me faint,” Patrick said.
“Faint later,” Amy said. “We have to get this guy patched up and get them all out of here as fast as we can, because they’re psycho-birdies, in case you didn’t notice.”
“You think they’ll just shake our hands and leave?” Patrick snorted. “Duh. They’re gonna look around here and figure out they have it made, and they’ll sit out the situation with us as their servants. Trust me on this. I used to be a waiter. Them, you don’t want to wait on.”
“Either way, we have to do this. We don’t have a choice. It’s going to look really gross, so do what I say and don’t think about it.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Great advice.”
“You want great advice?” Amy whispered, trying not to shout. She was pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
“Yes, I want great advice.”
“Don’t puke in the wound.”
Even with all the horror Patrick had seen in the last fortnight or so, the sight of serious injuries still made him feel light-headed and ill. Amy lifted the sticky cloth away, strings of coagulated blood stretching and breaking. Pale flesh stained with red, the hairs glued down. Around the entry wound a puffed-up doughnut of skin. The crater itself, a purple-black orifice, didn’t look as bad as Patrick expected. Amy had him pass along fistfuls of gauze, the sterile water, and any kind of antiseptic wipes he could find in their medical kit duffel bag; Patrick was hopeful she was just going to clean the skin and wrap the thing up, job done.
“Look for liquid iodine or something,” Amy said. “There might be some peroxide in a brown bottle, that’ll work.” Patrick knew exactly what peroxide looked like. There was a full bottle in the duffel. He handed it over. Amy sloshed the liquid liberally all over the leg injury. It foamed up, brown and fragrant, hissing. Jones screamed.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Murdo shouted.
“Just the fuck doing my job, Mr. Fucker Man,” Amy replied. As if to punctuate her response, she swabbed raw iodine on the wound, and Jones screamed again; Reese and Boudreau had to hold him down, Reese on the arms and Boudreau on the knees. By way of comfort they kept telling the writhing Jones not to be a fucking pussy.
In a level voice, Amy said, “Jones, how much do you weigh? One-eighty?”
The wounded man nodded, his teeth clenched so tight he couldn’t speak. Amy gestured with her chin: “Patrick, look for a box of little glass bottles labeled ‘Procaine Penicillin.’” He located the box and removed a couple of the bottles. “Now,” Amy continued, “look for a syringe. It will be in a paper packet.” Patrick handed bottles and syringe to Amy.
Patrick was absolutely going to pass out. No question.
Amy unwrapped the syringe and removed the plastic cap from the needle. She inserted the needle through the cap of a procaine bottle and drew the contents up into the syringe. She was about to press the needle into the ragged flesh at the edge of the wound when Patrick interrupted. He couldn’t help himself. Mostly, he was trying to postpone the moment when the needle entered the wound.
“Um—aren’t you supposed to squirt the bubbles out of the needle first?”
“You think there’s no air in there now?” Amy said, and sank the needle to the hilt right down inside the bullet hole.
Patrick made a croaking sound. Even Murdo took half a step back. But Jones didn’t seem to feel this additional outrage to his system. Amy picked up the second vial of procaine and injected that one, as well. Into the skin, rather than deep in the meat of the leg. Then she set the syringe aside.
“Don’t anybody touch that,” she said. “I’ll probably need it again. Tweezers, hemostat, scalpel, please.”
Before Patrick had a chance to overthink the situation, Amy was deep in the wound. She cut it open wider with the scalpel, had Patrick shine the flashlight down in the throat of the injury, and found what was looking for. Clamped it off with the hemostats. Then, with the long-nosed tweezers, she fished down to the depths, burrowing around for the bullet itself. The hemostats seemed to move of their own volition, like silvery wading birds with sharp beaks. While Amy worked, she began to talk.
“So how did he come by this?” Amy said. “Zombies can’t shoot.”
“Zeros,” Murdo said.
“Zeros who?”
“Zeros is what we call ’em. Not zombies.”
“Okay, a zero didn’t shoot him. Am I right?”
“Yeah,” said Reese. “He shot himself.”
“What caliber?”
“Nine millimeter,” Jones himself replied. His voice was tight. He was scared. “Pistol. I fucked up.”
“Got stuck with a tyro,” Murdo said. “Jones, lie still. If you bleed out, we’re gonna have to shoot you in the head. You want your momma should see you like that?”
“Nossir.” Jones was struggling, obviously feeling Amy’s exploration of the wound. He forced himself to lie still, but his face was rigid with the effort.
“We called for a chopper,” Murdo said. “No chopper. Lost contact with our main unit four days back. Supposed to rendezvous.”
“So, Jones, you shot yourself?” Amy said. “How long ago? A day?”
“Yesterday night,” he gasped.
“And since then you’ve been dealing with it?”
“Like a little baby girl,” Boudreau offered, renewing his grip on Jones’s knees. Patrick was acutely aware of how close he was to this huge, ugly man: all sour sweat, arm hair, and the whistle of breath through distorted nostrils. Not an appealing encounter. Patrick found he was staring at Boudreau to avoid seeing what Amy was doing. But he had to look, because she’d found something.
“No jacket,” Amy said. “Lead slug. You’re lucky this didn’t fragment too bad, but I think it hit the bone.”
Amy retrieved a piece of dark metal the size of a pencil eraser from Jones’s leg. Patrick felt an oily tide in the back of his throat, choked it down, and tried to breathe past the acid that surged behind his teeth. This squashed, bloody bit of metal had torn into this man’s leg at some huge speed and now Amy was pulling it out the way it came in. Almost too much to bear. He handed her wads of gauze and more of the iodine towelettes and tried to keep himself coherent.
Amy fished out another three or
four bits of metal, then a pale sliver of bone that looked like a chewed-up toothpick.
“I don’t see anything else, but no warranty is express or implied,” Amy said, and then: “Needle and gut, please.”
A few minutes later, stitching complete, there was a sterile bandage over the whole thing. Amy released the tourniquet from around Jones’s leg, and nothing seemed to happen. The bandage did not turn red. It might have actually worked.
“Can you feel your toes?” Amy asked. But Jones was unconscious.
The Ping-Pong table was a mess of bloody gauze and orange iodine stain, the sheet was ruined, her shirt (and Patrick’s, he now observed) spattered with blood and disinfectant. The air had a hospital stink, but also reeked of armpits and fear. Empty first-aid wrappers and packets littered the floor. Jones was breathing fast but his body was limp. His companions let go of him and stepped back. Amy passed her arm across her forehead.
“No charge,” she said. “Don’t put any weight on that for a few days. Now put those guns away.”
Murdo looked at Jones’s face, and it was hard to say whether his expression was one of concern or irritation. He looked unsatisfied. Then he brought his eyes up, taking everybody in.
“This entire installation is under our control until further notice,” he announced. “Martial law, shoot to kill, you know the drill. Follow my orders, we’ll all get along. Fuck with us whatsoever and things will get ugly.”
“Under whose authority?” Amy asked. Patrick had his head between his knees. He was recovering from an intense desire to be sick.
“Smith and Wesson,” Murdo replied, and walked outside. Boudreau and Reese walked out behind him, and Parker and another man with a shaved head stepped inside the door and stood there with their guns across their chests, eyes as blank as buttons.
“No need to thank me,” Amy said.
4
Nobody slept well that night. They’d had so little time without danger staring them in the face, and now instead of the living dead it was assholes with guns.
