by Ben Tripp
“That’s it? You’re with him, you’re cool?” Danny muttered to the driver as they entered the building.
“You’re as legitimate as the guy vouching for you,” he said. “I bring these guys smokes. They like me.” In the lobby they didn’t cross to the elevators but went around behind the elevator core to the stairs, which led down into the basement storage areas. Danny would have kept vital supplies on an upper floor, to make them easier to defend, but this wasn’t her fight. The entire basement of the building was stuffed with dry goods, medical equipment, and canned food, besides caches of ammunition and weapons in accessible locations. There were loading doors down there, some kind of access possible by truck, but she could see why they made everything come through the lobby. One less access point, one less hole in the defenses. Keep the loading doors shut so nobody in a nearby building decided to make a raid—and keep an eye on what came and went. The place smelled strongly of vegetable soup and diesel fuel. Danny imagined there must be a couple of ruptured cans in there somewhere. The diesel was for the generators, rumbling away in a sub-basement below the supplies. She could feel the vibration through her boots.
Once the groceries were all carried into the basement, Danny excused herself and asked at the front desk where the personnel files were being kept. The woman at the desk raised her eyebrows.
“I’m a cop,” Danny said. “I’m looking for some known criminals.” What the hell, at this point anybody would take anything for an excuse, as long as it sounded urgent.
She’d thought her story out in advance. It was quite a melodrama. If anybody asked, Danny was going to say she’d come up from Los Angeles in pursuit of some fugitives from the prison system down there, the worst of the worst, who broke out when everything went nuts. She had a list of names. Kelley’s name was on the list, of course.
As it transpired, nobody asked her what her story was. She was directed to a windowless, beige room on the first floor. There was a tired man with a white mustache at the desk she approached; he and a dozen others were transcribing names from handwritten sheets into a computer database. Danny asked to see the list of refugee names.
“The list we got isn’t going to do you any good,” the tired man said.
“I’d like to have a look anyway,” Danny said.
“Come back in a week,” the man said, shaking his head.
“Sir—it’s important.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. He turned his screen squarely away from Danny’s field of view. “Who are you with?”
“I’m from a small town outside Los Angeles—” Danny said, preparing to tell her story, and got no further than that. The tired man waved his hand at her.
“You’re not with Hawkstone or the city, am I right?”
“No,” Danny said. “Please let me look at the list, it’s important.”
“They didn’t ask you to come down here?”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Danny admitted. “This is a personal thing. I traveled three hundred miles for this.”
The man leaned back in his squeaky chair and chuckled. It was a dry, mirthless sound, the sort of noise that follows a cruel, not especially funny joke.
“The joke’s on you. Those goons upstairs told us we each had to input five hundred names an hour, or we’d be out on the street. So they hand us these piles of names they gather at the checkpoints”—here he gestured at a carton filled with grubby scraps of paper—“and we type any goddamn name in on the computer, and at the end of every shift we dump all this crap in the incinerator. In other words, there is no list.”
Danny’s eyes stung. The air outside was dense and gritty; the wind had shifted again, carrying with it a burden of filthy smoke and ash. If Danny wept, she could tell herself it was only the smoke. There was no difference, in the end: Either way, all that was left was ashes. She looked back at the Pyramid Building and wondered how long it would be before the place was inhabited only by walking corpses. It was time to get out of San Francisco before the whole place went down, get back to Boscombe Field, and do what she did best: brood on her own failures.
Danny drove out to the perimeter with her patrol team, rifle propped up between her knees, a knife in the pocket of her uniform pants. Her mind was fixed on a single goal: to get out of the fortified city. She took her first patrol of the assigned block. Two buildings opposite had caught fire during the day, and they were excusing the former inhabitants for coming and going in the smoldering wreckage during curfew hours. The entire block was illuminated by the small fires that ate at whatever was left besides charcoal and masonry. As the night wore on, people found places to lie down and were not seen again.
Danny found herself alone, sometime in the hour between very late and very early. She stood below the smoke rising over the city, its sound like the sound of falling snow, a kind of pressure in the ear, almost a nonsound. Beyond, the fires rumbled and muttered. Turbulent, muscular smoke rolled up into the atmosphere, candescent at the skyline where the red flames leaped up inside it, dancing with bright izles that flared and winked out. The smoke bellied overhead, black and hot and dry, raining down ash and cinders. The stench was awful: Sulfur and poison and the destruction of ordinary things filled Danny’s nose.
She was desperate to be out of the city before dawn, on her way back to Boscombe Field, but haste at this point would be fatal. She decided to patrol in the usual fashion, looking for some opportunity to slip away and get through the barrier between the living and the dead. It would almost be safer among the zeros. At least they were predictable.
Halfway through Danny’s first shift standing watch, her shoulders heaped with ash, she heard an engine approaching. A Humvee rolled up the block and came to a halt directly in front of her position. A man in camouflage with a shaggy chin beard leaned out of the passenger side window.
“You Danny?” he asked.
Danny didn’t say anything. She had her T-shirt pulled up through her collar, over the lower half of her face, to keep the soot out. She thought fast: What did he want? Why? Who sent him? He shone a flashlight in her eyes to verify she was the one he was looking for. Then he hooked his thumb at the back of the vehicle.
“I can’t leave my post,” Danny said. “This is the side the zeros will come from.”
The man in the Humvee said something into his radio.
“It’s covered,” he told Danny. Danny slung her rifle down from her shoulder and climbed in the back, that familiar wide, flat space with benches along the sides she’d spent so much time bouncing around in during her tours of duty. There were two Hawkstone men in there with her, both wearing hardware store respirator masks. She sat close to the open tail of the vehicle and kept her rifle at a careless attitude—one that would make it quick to aim, if they decided to try something.
In her rapid analysis of the situation she couldn’t come up with any good-news reason for the attention. She was in trouble. Probably her useless stint down in the records room of the Pyramid Building. The tired man with the mustache might have ratted her out.
They drove in silence for a few minutes, first westward, then what looked like due south. The west side of the road was bordered by a massive barricade, composed mostly of crushed vehicles and chunks of architecture, bulldozed into a rough wall and bound with accordion wire. It ran, as far as Danny could see, all the way along the street, crushed up against the façades of the buildings and piled across the intersections to form an unbroken boundary twice the height of a man. The smoky, fire-blown darkness outside was punctuated in this new area by battery-powered area lamps, so the world alternated between deep, bloody brown shadows and pools of sickening green light. It appeared to be snowing heavily, but the air was parching hot.
The windshield wipers scraped ash off the glass. The driver was hunched over, visibility poor. Choking grit swirled in through the back of the Humvee. One of the lights caught the blade of a street sign, and Danny saw they were traveling along Guerrero Street. This meant nothing to her i
n terms of navigation, but she knew what the word meant: warrior. Ramirez had taught it to her, in the desert on the other side of the world.
They came to a broad intersection where a Bradley fighting vehicle stood, a gunner in night vision goggles manning the .50 caliber weapon on the roof. The cross-street was barricaded with razor wire set up on pylons. Close behind the barricade were fresh, bright flames and the lumpen silhouettes of massed undead, clawing at the barrier, eyes flashing yellow when they reflected the lights. There were thousands of them. The air boomed with fire and moaning from voiceless mouths.
Danny had come to the literal border between life and death.
She climbed out of the Humvee, her rifle swinging casually within a few degrees of the men she was with. They stood around, waiting for someone. The man with the chin beard spoke into his radio again. Danny very much wanted one of those radios. She also wanted one of the machine guns. Most of all, however, she wanted to not be standing here where the roar of the fires and the moaning of the undead mingled on the hot gusting breeze. The air was pregnant with combustion, as if it might itself burst into sheets of flame, so full of gas and heat.
This, Danny thought, is the apocalypse.
These were the possibilities: First, they would shoot her on the spot. In that case she was going to try to take out a couple of them before she died. Not much of a plan.
Next option: They were going to send her out there to die. In that case she would simply follow her original plan: run like hell. This plan lacked detail.
The third possibility was that they wanted her to look at the situation they were in, and suggest some strategic ideas based on her experiences out there on the other side of the line. That was the most logical conclusion to come to, and the least likely scenario as far as Danny was concerned. Nobody, in her considerable experience, did anything for good, logical reasons; they did things based on their own narrow preconceived ideas of how the world ought to work.
It might only be that. But Danny could feel the presence of death.
After she and her escort had stood in the sickly glow of the battery lamps long enough to gather a fresh coat of ash, a new variable entered the intersection.
It was a motorcycle, some kind of fast Japanese thing covered in plastic fairings. The rider let the bike drop on its side and walked away from it; it was nothing but a tool. Danny noticed that Chin-beard and the rest of the men around her stiffened at the approach of this figure. They didn’t come to attention; the slack simply pulled out of their postures. They were tense. Danny held her rifle carelessly, as before, but her muscles were taut. If this was the executioner, she was taking the first shot.
As the rider approached, emerging from firelit outline into dimensional figure, Danny thought Death himself would have approved. Maybe this was the presence she felt.
He was clad entirely in leather. Against human teeth, there were no vulnerable points on this man. He was sealed into a thick, scraped-up leather riding suit, stiff with crash pads. The boots were overkill, Danny decided. About fifty buckled straps from knee to toe, which meant they were heavy as hell, and inflexible. But Danny thought the elbow-length gauntlets were a great idea. The man looked like a lean, black alligator, seamed and stitched with zippers. On his head he wore a yellow plastic construction helmet over a leather aviator’s cap, ski goggles, and a respirator. Around his waist was a belt bristling with ugly instruments for piercing and striking, and a holster containing what looked like a Luger automatic from the Second World War.
For a few seconds, Danny was intimidated by this bizarre, invulnerable creature that strode toward her. In the next moment, it was all she could do not to laugh. He looked like he was late for a Halloween party as much as anything else. Very Beyond Thunderdome. He was so heavily clad he couldn’t move half as fast as Danny, he probably couldn’t hear very well, and his peripheral vision was shit. She could fuck this guy up.
The apparition before her pulled the face-concealing respirator down, and Danny got her next surprise. It was a woman. The tool belt and leathers had hidden her shape. The woman snapped the ski goggles up over the brim of the safety helmet and stared around at the men in the party, then examined Danny like a conquest of battle. Danny didn’t say anything or show any reaction, her expression bland.
“So you’re the tough guy,” she purred. “They call me the Zero Killer.” Her voice was like honey and bourbon. Pitched low. Her face was clean and smooth where the soot couldn’t reach, a tribal pattern of grit marking the narrow, exposed margins between goggles and mask. Chin-beard hawked and spat into the feathery ash at their feet. He thumbed in Danny’s direction.
“She don’t know shit about the mission. Figured you could tell her,” he said. He was being evasive, Danny thought. So there was going to be a big lie in the next part of the conversation, or maybe something was going to happen. This was exactly how people died. Your executioner turns out to be a bondage chick, you let your guard down, and you’re dead. Danny couldn’t let it happen like that. The woman turned squarely to Danny, dismissing the men from her attention; they kept standing around, their roles subtly shifted to that of entourage.
“Heard you fought your way up here from L.A.,” the woman said.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “What’s up?” She didn’t want to fuck around. If this is it, let’s get to the fighting. She was getting tired from the long period of keeping her body tensed for the defense.
“I have an assignment out there,” the woman said, “but I can’t do it alone. It takes four hands. So far, everybody’s died before we reach the objective. Not that I blame them.”
“Huh,” Danny said. The absurdity of her position was making her careless, but she couldn’t find the edge. She was sinking into a state of disbelief. She might as well be talking to Bozo the Clown about a trip to the moon. But if this assignment would get Danny out of the city—
“You’re smiling. What’s funny?” the leatherwoman said.
“I just remembered an old joke,” Danny said, no longer interested in these people. They weren’t going to kill her, at least not on the spot. They had some elaborate plan worked out. Get Danny’s back turned and sic some zombies on her a mile out there in the wasteland, for whatever reason. Shoot her in the head on a long walk to some photo opportunity the senator thought she’d enjoy seeing. Danny now realized she was more interested in why all this was happening than what was supposed to happen next. Which, of course, could be fatal. She focused her attention again. Stay on point. You against the world. Starting with these weirdos.
The men who flanked Danny were shifting uneasily. This woman clearly scared the shit out of them. Danny decided to dial the amusement back. Play the seasoned professional angle. Make Ms. Thunderdome feel like she was with an equal. Danny spoke into the silence.
“Look, I was walking the beat, these boys drug me all the way to the back of beyond here, and I don’t know a goddamn thing. So how about you tell me what’s happening? Because we’re wasting time. I hate wasting time. Not much of it around.”
Half an hour later, Danny and the leather-bound Liz Magnussen, aka “Zero Killer,” were on their way into zombie territory. They had made a brief stop at a generator-powered construction trailer, where Danny was kitted up with gear: Over her uniform she wore a police-style motorcycle jacket of horsehide, yellow buckskin gloves, and a knit watch cap to keep her ears tucked away—they had lost a lot of people to infected bites on the ears. Danny refused the heavy riding chaps, calf-length linesman’s boots, and leather skullcap. She gladly accepted one of the loaded belts of equipment they had hanging on coat pegs in the trailer.
It was a standard police belt with the basket-weave pattern stamped into it. The little sleeves that normally held pepper spray, spare clips, knife, and chewing gum had been opened up at the bottom to allow the shafts of weapons to pass through them. Other implements were held on with Velcro bands.
Magnussen demonstrated the use of them, with several admiring onlookers keep
ing well back. “We got some welding equipment and we’ve been making things up as we go along. This one is brand new—it’s a brain pick.” It was a steel bar with a cruciform end, each of the three tips of the cross sharpened like nails. “Thrust with the middle point. Go for the mouth. Up and in. Or you can swing it side to side like a hammer. I find it’s easier backhand than forehand. Female wrists,” she added, and a couple of the onlookers laughed.
Danny was intrigued by the woman’s face: She had a Scandinavian name, but she looked at least half Asian. Could have been a showgirl, except for the crooked nose and the old, white scar that ran along the top of her upper lip.
Magnussen went on: “These brain picks have changed the game. I carry four of them, you have three on you now. If they get stuck in a zero you definitely don’t want to dick around trying to pull one out while the rest are coming at you. Just grab another, like Kleenex.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Danny said, thinking how handy these things would have been the last couple of weeks. She didn’t notice that the attention in the trailer had shifted to her: In her element now, she sounded as tough and competent as the “Zero Killer.” No nerves, only professionalism.
Magnussen continued: “There’s a bunch of other pig-stickers on there as well. Jab ’em and leave ’em is my advice, but you can’t have too many weapons. One thing I found—aim for the nose. That slows the zeros down.”
Danny nodded. “They hunt by sense of smell. I think they can smell our breath. I noticed you stop breathing, their attention kind of wanders.”
Magnussen herself seemed impressed by this. “Right, exactly. That’s why I wear the respirator. Cuts down on my human signature.”
She detached another Velcro-affixed device from her belt, a length of iron pipe with a small loop of wire at one end and a screw-on cap at the other. The onlookers shifted even further away. Danny figured that one for a homemade grenade. Magnussen had half a dozen of them along the back of her belt, which also made an effective kidney protector—assuming the wire loops didn’t get caught on something.
