by Ben Tripp
“Yank the wire and throw. Even if the wire doesn’t come all the way out, assume you have ten seconds. We make ’em long-fused because this isn’t man-to-man combat. This enemy never get out of the way when they see one coming. Filled with ball bearings or dimes. Who says money isn’t worth anything anymore?”
Everyone but Danny laughed at that.
“I want one of those radios, too,” Danny said, indicating Magnussen’s satellite unit. There was a rack of them charging on the wall.
“No can do,” a man said from the end of the trailer.
“Why not?” Danny asked. “This is life and death.”
“Because you are not authorized—” the man began. Magnussen interrupted him:
“Give her one, Sheldon. Set it to six-seven-seven.”
The man shrugged and complied. Danny took the precious radio and inserted it in her belt. But now Danny found her pants were coming down. She’d lost a lot of weight in all the excitement of the past couple of weeks. So she lightened her belt: One of the brain picks would do. All those other pointed weapons hanging down around her legs could end up in a self-inflicted wound that would leave her at the mercy of the zombies. She’d rather improvise than crawl. She’d done all her crawling elsewhere in the world.
Besides the brain picks, she kept four grenades and a big hunting knife. There were some other, more common implements: a multitool, a butane pencil torch, and a stubby high-intensity flashlight. She kept those, too.
“You aren’t equipped for the assignment,” Magnussen said, when Danny was done cutting down on her armament.
“Then why don’t you tell me just exactly what the fuck it is?” Danny said, and stepped outside.
They trudged through the rubble and charred remains of what had been the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. The corner where they crossed through the barricades was, to Danny’s grim amusement, the intersection of Guerrero and Army streets. César Chávez was in there somewhere but the street-naming scheme didn’t make sense, major routes blending into each other at odd moments. They sprinted down Guerrero until it became San Jose Avenue and then walked for a long way through the predawn darkness.
Zeros were everywhere in the beginning. They were massed up behind the barricade and it took considerable diversion to get Magnussen and Danny over the wall without a horde of the moaning creatures descending on them in such numbers they couldn’t have gotten through. There was no question of using the gates—the zeros seemed to have figured out that was the way to the meat buffet.
“Anybody want anything while we’re out?” Magnussen quipped, and again the others laughed. “I’m going to be famous when this is over,” she whispered to Danny. She’s an attention freak, Danny realized. She’s doing this like it’s a reality show.
The situation was slipping into insanity. Reality was rapidly losing its hold on the world.
They had to go up and over the obstacle, cross a ladder laid horizontally to the upstairs window of an apartment building, and then emerge on a fire escape on the opposite side. By that time they were a block away from where their confederates were acting as decoys, shouting and throwing debris at the undead.
Danny wasn’t sure the survivors should have been taunting such a huge crowd of the things: It seemed to energize the zeros, to make them throw themselves at the barrier. But diversion was the only way to get past them. What was most disturbing about the hellish scene—besides the hideous burns and injuries evident on so many of the undead—was the way the zombies were streaming toward the barricade from all quarters of the city.
Danny and Magnussen ran for the first quarter-mile once they hit the pavement below the fire escape, their flashlight beams whirling. There was no other way to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer number of their enemy. It pleased Danny to observe she had better endurance than her counterpart, and it wasn’t only the heavy Road Warrior boots. Danny was more fit.
They were headed for what Magnussen called “280.” In Los Angeles it was the 405 or the 134. Here they only said the number, which was confusing. The 280 ran diagonally from the southwest to the northeast of the city, heading for Oakland. The mission was fairly simple, but it had so far claimed a number of qualified lives—Magnussen had made it by herself as far as their goal, but one person couldn’t simultaneously take care of business and take care of herself. She’d heard from the people “back at command” that Danny’s exploits had marked her as maybe the best potential scout to have entered the city since the fall of Chinatown.
They compared notes on the abilities of the zeros. Danny related her experiences with faster, more adept ones; Magnussen had seen some relatively bright examples but didn’t entirely believe Danny’s tale of problem-solving zombies. “The door must not have latched,” she said, of the old female zombie that had attacked Danny in the Potter hotel, turning a doorknob to get at her. Then Magnussen added, “Because if they get smart, we’re done.”
So far, those in the San Francisco area were the slow, stupid variety. Magnussen certainly took the situation seriously enough despite her quips; she was at the top of the zombie-fighting heap in this town. But she had contempt for her foe. That would end in disaster someday. For that matter, Danny didn’t trust her companion in the least; she was positive she’d been chosen to go on this mission with Magnussen because they needed someone expendable. Even if Danny made it back, she had a feeling the gates wouldn’t open for both of them. Not if it meant Magnussen would have to share the limelight. Not if Vivian Anka wanted to “get her back.” But maybe Danny was getting paranoid. Sure she was. That’s why she was still alive. It didn’t matter what they had planned for her in the city, anyway. She had no intention of returning.
Magnussen was leading her straight out of the hot zone. In return, Danny would get Magnussen to the objective, wish her well, then commandeer a vehicle and bug out back to Boscombe Field.
“What’s your story?” Danny asked, as they marched along, double-time. There was a long tail of zeros coming up behind them, but Magnussen didn’t seem concerned. The women were moving faster than the zombies, and the undead lost interest once the human scent faded, so the numbers that followed along never increased beyond thirty or forty, and they were well behind.
Since running the gauntlet outside the perimeter barricade, they hadn’t come within twenty feet of a zero. No point in seeking a fight. Almost all of the undead in this area were burnt, some profoundly so, barely able to move; they had shambled in from the nearby fire-swept districts. Danny kept her eye on the freshest-looking specimens, because those could have traveled from outside the fire zone. They might be smarter.
Magnussen didn’t answer her question. Danny didn’t press the point.
They fast-walked, sometimes jogging, for three or four miles through the night. The best way to see ahead was to flick the flashlights rapidly back and forth across their path; it created a 3-D effect that made human shapes leap out of the background darkness.
Magnussen raised her hand and stopped. She drew a brain pick from her belt. “There’s a hell of a lot of them up ahead, and then we’re at 280. There’s a fence, and they collect up against it. We’re gonna take a shortcut down Cuvier Street, where it’s not going to be populated as bad, but it’s real narrow and there’s cars all over the place. Two blocks and a U-turn at the end. There’s a wall and an embankment down to the freeway there. You can’t see over the wall. So we’re gonna do a Hail Mary.”
Their objective, as Magnussen had explained it, was to reach a convoy of Army vehicles that had gotten bogged down during the second day of the crisis, northbound on the freeway in what was known as the Sunnyside neighborhood. Helicopter flyovers by Hawkstone men had revealed the convoy included a flatbed truck with “a highly desirable military payload,” the deployment of which could create an exit corridor from the downtown area to a safe zone outside the city. Danny didn’t point out that there was no safe zone outside the city; anywhere had to be better than this. There must have been h
alf a million zeros massed around the downtown with its chewy, delicious center.
Magnussen warned Danny that there would be numerous zeros in uniforms and body armor around the objective, which made them a hell of a lot harder to kill. None of them were living. She shouldn’t hesitate to take them down. In addition to the Army unit that had originally been driving the armaments, they had subsequently lost a Hawkstone helicopter unit there, back when Hawkstone was still at the leading edge of the fight. Now the remains of the Army and Hawkstone men were shuffling around, hungry for prey, still inadvertently guarding their payload.
Danny and Magnussen had briefly discussed who would do what. Their task was to get the flatbed moving. The freeway was a mass of wreckage and destruction to the north, where it became the Embarcadero and formed one of the boundaries of the inhabited zone of the city. But it looked like they could drive a machine as heavy as the flatbed through the light scatter of abandoned vehicles up to that point. From there it would be possible for a good-sized squad of people to come through the defensive line, retrieve the payload, and make it back to safety.
The problem, however, was that the foremost vehicle in the convoy was one of the massive, dinosaurlike Cougar MRAPs, a cross between an armored car and a cement truck. It was squarely blocking the freeway. The monstrous vehicle would have to be moved; the flatbed couldn’t shove its thirty-two-thousand-pound mass out of the way.
Magnussen could operate a nonsychronous gearbox, so she would drive the flatbed. The MRAP was an automatic.
Danny was entirely on board with the plan, except for one detail. There was no way she would be returning to the cab of the flatbed with Magnussen. She was on her own after Danny got the Cougar out of the way. In fact, Danny was going to commandeer the Cougar to get herself out of the urban area in high style. Somehow she didn’t think Magnussen would mind very much seeing her rival for the “Queen of the Zombie Killers” crown leave town.
Although it wasn’t entirely fair to abandon Magnussen before the return journey, Danny had a feeling she would be far better off ducking out early. She tried to tell herself she was thinking too much: Ms. Zero Killer seemed, if not friendly, at least professional. Danny had been observing her unusual companion in action—she obviously got off on the superhero stuff, dressing up like Batman and carrying a belt full of weapons. A showoff. Danny had also noticed Magnussen playing up the dangers for her colleagues, back behind the perimeter. She was making the most of the situation.
Danny didn’t think she had any mischief in mind—the situation was dangerous enough as it was, without any cloak-and-dagger stuff. But she would have to be very alert for the moment when she was no longer indispensable, and maybe get out of there before that moment arrived. One never knew. After all, none of Magnussen’s previous companions had come back alive.
They stood looking down the shortcut of Cuvier Street, with dawn beginning to creep up the sky out past where the fires burned, glimmering through the pall of smoke that hung over the entire horizon. The zeros that had been following them were getting closer, moaning with lust for flesh. Others emerged from the buildings around them. This neighborhood had so far escaped the fires. Danny assumed there must be living people in some of these structures, drinking toilet water and living on canned beans or handfuls of flour or whatever they had. Could be thousands, still alive, huddled in terror. Nothing could be done for them. This entire exercise was for the benefit of what was left of the urban core. She saw nothing beyond the common, stupid zombies that infested most places. None of the fast ones. Maybe it was a fluke, the clever ones found only in Potter. She didn’t dare hope so.
The dark street was a tangle of automobiles and furniture. It looked like some people had attempted a crude barricade in the middle of the block. There were bodies in the street, several torn to pieces, several others intact; Danny knew those would come after them. They had only paused for a few seconds. Danny’s mind was racing. There wasn’t much to think about, now. She and her leather-clad companion simply had to sprint through that obstacle course and get over the wall and once they got to the freeway there was going to be an entirely new fight.
Danny drew her own brain pick and slipped one of the primitive grenades out of her belt. “I think we should blast ourselves a little room,” she said. Magnussen nodded. She wasn’t wearing her respirator now; it hung loosely around her neck. No point masking her breath signature if there was someone without a mask by her side. They took hold of the wires in their bombs.
“How accurate are the fuses on these things?” Danny asked.
“Don’t wait around,” Magnussen said, and they pulled and threw at the same moment.
Danny threw her grenade down Cuvier, arcing it high up into the darkness. It rattled to the pavement and rolled under a Plymouth skewed across the street. Magnussen threw hers back the way they came, lobbing it low so it came to rest against the feet of one of the zombies pursuing them, a male in the middle of the nearest pack, which had around twenty individuals in it. Both women threw themselves full-length on the ground. Danny had never used anything with such a long delay—after three or four seconds, she expected to hear an explosion. It took so long for these delayed-fuse grenades she thought they must be duds. She could hear the one behind them clinking along the pavement as the zombie shuffled over it. Finally she looked up. At that moment, both weapons exploded.
Hers produced a satisfying concussion, blasting apart the tires of the Plymouth and shredding everything around it. The car rose in the air at least six feet, then crashed straight down on its axles and began to burn. Danny was momentarily blinded, her teeth rattling together. The explosion was several times greater than that of a military M-26 grenade. All the glass in the buildings on both sides of the blast disintegrated, and the siding and stucco of the walls belched fragments and dust. Shrapnel whickered over their heads. Magnussen’s grenade was closer, and the ground shock bounced them off the pavement. Danny didn’t see what damage it did, but she heard pattering in the rooftops and on the asphalt. Gobbets of reeking flesh rained down on them.
“Go,” Magnussen said. Although Danny’s vision was still swimming with amorphous green afterimages of the explosion, she went.
They ran like Olympic sprinters, hurdling over debris, dodging cars and pickups. The zeros were torn to bits at the near end of the first block; they made it to the end of the block without anything even getting to its feet.
Across the intersection on the second block, they were in some trouble. A lot of the undead had come out to see what made the noise. Fuck it, Danny thought, and ran as fast as she could, her boots slapping on the road, arms pumping. Simple plans worked best. She was going to run so damn fast they couldn’t catch up with her. She got three houses down the block before it was time for a new plan. Magnussen wasn’t with her. Danny looked back; her companion was out of sight. She had taken a different route when they reached the intersection. Or, for all Danny knew, she was heading back to base, mission accomplished, Danny dead.
As she looked over her shoulder, Danny lost track of the zeros nearest to her. One of them stumbled into her path and she slammed into it, knocking the breath out of herself. She tumbled and rolled and thumped heavily into the side of an old Volkswagen Beetle, the running board crashing into her ribs.
There was no air inside her. She got to her feet, winded to the point of panic, and as she tried to refill her lungs, the next two zombies arrived. They reached for her, and their fingers—now soft and decaying—slithered across the leather of her jacket. She ripped the brain pick from her belt and shoved it into the nearest face, yanked it out, and stuck it into the temple of the next one. It didn’t work very well—the heads rocked back, decreasing penetration. The thing she had run into was at her feet, crawling. It grabbed her legs, and the tattered fabric of her uniform trousers was not going to stop its teeth from taking a chunk of meat. Danny kicked it in the head, shoved past the ones she had wounded—the brain was farther back in the skull than she had
imagined—and made herself run again, breathless as she was. This was Forest Peak all over again, except this time, she wasn’t going to get help.
It was shoulder work now. She shoved through the mass of stinking, wet bodies. They were forcing her to a standstill with their numbers. Yet she realized the fingers weren’t holding her, the teeth couldn’t crush into her flesh with force enough to break the skin. The dynamics of the attack had changed. These hadn’t fed in a week or more. They were coming apart, slimy as spoiled chicken. Their limbs moved poorly, senses dull. They often fell. Danny understood why Magnussen didn’t believe her story of advanced-skill zombies. She’d been coming out here where they got less capable, not more so.
Magnussen’s reputation as a zero destroyer was probably founded on these trips out into the distant areas of town, where the fight actually got easier. It was Magnussen’s best-kept secret.
Danny was still electric with fear, but she found herself plowing through the things like a quarterback. She could almost tear their arms off. She was soaked in stinking fluids and scraps of gooey, dead skin like the flesh of octopus. She was a destroyer of monsters. Now: There was a weapon she could work with, a prybar stuck through the windshield of a car. She dragged it out and swung it like King Arthur and heads burst, jaws tore off, arms cracked and spun wildly on rags of flesh.
She didn’t have to destroy them. She could disable them, turn them into twitching meat. Without arms, without jaws, without teeth, they could only rot. She remembered the great numbers of fire-damaged zeros back at the barricades. Hideous, terrifying things, red and black, webbed with fissures of white where the fat and tendons showed. Ears and noses scorched away, eyeballs like skinned knuckles. They were almost harmless, she realized. Those roasted muscles would have little success holding, biting. And with every day that went by, they got weaker.
