by Ben Tripp
The door was jammed shut. Amy shoved hard, shoved again. She could hear chair legs shuddering over the slick floor tiles. She kicked the door, and it squeaked open another inch. Now she could get her hand through the gap. She felt the back of a plastic stacking chair wedged under the door handle. Shook it free and swung the door open, just as Murdo and Ace came racing down from the men’s dormitory, guns in hand, wearing their cargo pants but no shirts or boots.
They could all see inside the bathroom. They all saw the same thing.
Murdo wasn’t going to be able to play this one as a he-said-she-said. Because Cammy was jammed up in the corner by the paper towel dispensers, and he—the Flamingo—was crushed up against her, one hand twisted down at her groin, the other at her throat. The woman was terrified, the whites showing all the way around her eyes. She looked at Amy and there was pleading on her face, but silent pleading, because the Flamingo was choking her silent.
Amy didn’t make a plan. She simply grabbed the plastic chair, raised it over her left shoulder, and charged. She swung it at the pink-skinned, pink-haired man, her eyes fixed on the back of his neck. I hope I kill him, Amy thought, and an instant later the chair wasn’t in her hands.
She careened into the man, his hard muscles unyielding, and because the chair was gone she was off-balance and fell. She was back up on her knees within half a second. Flamingo hadn’t even turned all the way around. Amy started punching, aiming for his legs, his crotch, anything to stop him. He kicked her away before she landed a single worthwhile blow, and then strong hands were dragging her backward. Ace towed Amy along the floor with one hand twisted into her hair and the other hand shoving his pistol in her face. She could smell the tang of the gun oil. She was spitting with fury; injustice like a cliff towered above her and she wanted to smash it down. Flamingo, she saw, had turned to Murdo. Murdo was holding the chair he’d pulled out of Amy’s hands. There was a crazy daisy sticker on the chair.
Flamingo had his back to Cammy, his hands held out to Murdo, shaking his head in a now-let’s-be-reasonable kind of way, a bashful little smile on his piebald face. It might have ended there, boys will be boys, everybody back to your own beds. Except Cammy’s foot appeared from behind Flamingo, with the suddenness of a magic trick, in the fork between his legs. His trouser legs jumped halfway up his shins. The blow made a noise like a preacher whacking his Bible in midsermon.
“That’s for Patrick, you asshole!” Cammy shouted. Flamingo went down in slow motion, his neck rigged with tendons like a schooner in a high wind, teeth bared, eyes bulging. Ace let go of Amy’s hair. One moment Cammy was there, blazing with life, tall with defiance. The next moment there was a crisp, ear-splitting report that buzzed off the tiles, and the wall behind Cammy was blooming with red roses. Her head snapped back and she fell to the floor, dead. Flamingo lay on his side clutching his testicles while the blood flowed out of Cammy in the shape of a monstrous red hand, its fingers crawling along the grout lines, oozing toward the fallen man, as if to avenge its dead. Amy looked away.
Jones was leaning against the doorframe, his wounded leg held stiffly at an angle in front of him. His face was sheet-rumpled, his hair awry. He stared at the bloody scene, then spoke to Murdo: “Sir? What the fuck is going on?”
8
Danny tried to shout, but her voice was gone along with her strength. She didn’t want herself or Liz Magnussen to die at the teeth of the undead wolfpack that was encircling them. Her mind was still tumbling around from the crack on the head she’d received. Magnussen, oblivious to the approaching danger, continued to curse out loud. She put two shots from her Luger into one of the sluggish undead by the MRAP that Danny’s grenade hadn’t blown apart. The others were motionless, or struggling with shattered limbs, unable to attack. Danny croaked, then tried again; it sounded more like the zombie moan than anything else. She tried to wave her hands. One of them lifted up a few inches, then fell back. She turned her protesting neck to follow how far the hunter zeros had gotten in their careful stalking of their live prey.
There was one eight feet away from Danny.
It was so close, she could hear the rustle of its scabby tongue behind yellow teeth. The thing was looking directly at her with frost-dimmed eyes. When it saw her, it froze in position, knees bent, one leg forward, both arms held crookedly out before it with fingers extended. It stood like that, motionless, for several seconds.
Then it scented the air like an animal, hooking its shrunken nose into the dawn breeze. It smells me, Danny thought. She was helpless. It had her.
The zero moved, but not toward Danny. It hunched down low and slunk away to the next position of concealment, behind a dusty hatchback. Danny’s heart flooded with emotion.
It saw her and didn’t want to eat her.
It smelled her and moved on.
She could hardly move, and her throat would not speak. An evil thought came to her: If the thing didn’t attack, she must already be one of them.
Yet she felt pain, not hunger.
She felt fear for the living woman who was now up the ladder of the MRAP, shouting her disgust at the stench inside the cab.
Get in and shut the door, you stupid bitch! Danny screamed inside herself. She tried to make the words come out but her vocal cords were unstrung and she could only gasp, sucking in a throatful of putrid gas.
Then Danny understood why she herself was still alive: She was soaked in the sludge of the far-rotten soldier’s corpse. She stank so powerfully it would make a graveyard rat puke. On her, the zombie couldn’t smell the living breath, the warmth of her blood. It could only smell its own, decaying kind.
Danny bent her eyes toward the Cougar MRAP.
Magnussen didn’t get into the cab, having discovered the same unbearable filth that had knocked Danny back. Instead she waved her hands around to clear the flies from her face and started searching the pavement for something. Maybe a rag to wipe up the rotten guts on the front seat.
She kept an eye on the nearest of the shuffling, slow zeros that were making their way toward her, but Danny had cleared a considerable radius with the explosion. Magnussen thought she had plenty of time.
What Magnussen was not anticipating (because you wouldn’t fucking listen, shouted the voice inside Danny’s head) was the stealthy approach of undead with fast reflexes, hunting instincts, and the ability to use concealment to get close to their prey.
Several others of the stalking pack had moved within twenty feet of the Cougar.
Magnussen had something less than fifteen seconds to get inside that vehicle and slam the door. If she did, she was safe as houses. She was surrounded by inch-thick steel plate, triple bulletproof glass, and a variety of armaments and survival gear.
Who gives a shit what it smells like, in the name of God, Danny shouted, silently. Get in.
Danny tried again to wave her companion away, to get her attention, and this time she was able to lift both hands. Life was returning to her limbs. She wasn’t dead; her body was only rebooting. She still couldn’t speak.
Then she had an idea. Danny dragged her numb fingers around behind her belt, knuckles scraping on the pavement, and groped them across the tattered band of leather, looking for the satellite radio. It was gone. But there was a single pipe grenade left. She willed her fingers to close around it and they did, in the same slow, imprecise way as the artificial hands she’d seen at the veteran’s rehab center when she was learning to use her legs again.
She got the grenade clear of the belt and pulled her arm around by force of will until she could grasp the pipe with both hands. She probably couldn’t throw it far enough to avoid killing herself, but she didn’t particularly relish surviving much longer, anyway. This was a better way to die. There were six or seven of the hunting zombies gathered behind vehicles all around Magnussen now, and Danny couldn’t figure out why her companion hadn’t seen them.
But she knew the answer already. Because she doesn’t believe in them, of course.
; Danny turned her eyes to the grenade. She gathered her will, sending conscious commands to her arms. She pulled the fuse wire with all the force she could muster, and it didn’t move. She pulled again, and now that her arms were familiar with the orders they yanked apart and the wire came smartly out of the grenade. There was a little whiff of fuse smoke that nipped inside Danny’s nostrils, breaking through the stench of corpses. This was it. If things went the way she thought they might, she was about to be blown apart, either by dimes or ball bearings. She preferred dimes, if given a choice. Classier.
She turned her body like a rusty spring and threw the grenade as hard as she could.
To Danny’s surprise, the missile sailed briskly into the air and clanked down among the cars, not far from a pair of the crouching zeros. Magnussen heard the noise, and turned, pistol raised, searching with her eyes. Danny tried once more to shout.
At last, Magnussen saw the zombies. They broke cover at the same moment, oblivious to the importance of the grenade, but recognizing their quarry was alerted to them.
Silent as lions they came on, jaws open.
Magnussen fired three shots in rapid succession, pivoting her arm straight out in front of her to sweep the pack as it charged. One of the things went heavily down, then the rest were upon her.
She screamed, a low, angry cry, that honeyed singer’s voice lending melody even to this. The zeros slammed her against the hull of the MRAP.
Danny couldn’t see clearly—Magnussen was obscured between the fenders of the vehicle. Danny saw the monsters grabbing her arms, biting, trying to tear through the leather.
How long had it been since she threw the grenade? Five seconds? Six? It seemed as if ten minutes had passed since the fuse had flared to life.
Magnussen had one arm free of her tormentors and was shouting, swinging a brain pick side-to-side. She nailed one of the things, caught it in the head and it fell, its legs kicking as if electrified. But now Magnussen’s hands were empty. Another of the undead lunged in, teeth flashing, and she was shoved back completely out of sight and her hoarse shouts turned to a high, gurgling whistle. Danny was too far away to tell if it was human blood or zombie ink, but something squirted through the air.
Seven, eight.
The grenade exploded. A blazing automobile door sailed high overhead and crashed down out of sight beyond Danny’s position. She blinked as the explosion drove a wave of hot, gritty air into her face. The MRAP rocked back on its wheels, then lurched down again. Cars burst into flame; gasoline tanks ruptured and blew. Black, greasy smoke coiled into the light of the newly risen sun, which was burning a bright crescent into the eastern horizon of rooftops.
One of the undead hunters stumbled out of the smoke, flames clambering over its ragged flesh. It stumbled, sought balance against a car, then continued. Eventually the thing fell down, and struggled, and lay still.
Danny drove the Humvee along the obstacle course of the freeway, away from San Francisco. She bulled the heavy truck through the smaller vehicles. This wasn’t detail work. She simply had to make some distance. The military Hummers were equipped with an on-off switch, not keys, so it had been the work of a few seconds to get the machine running and maneuver her way into the maze of motionless vehicles.
All along her route she saw the hunting undead: dozens of them at first, then hundreds, then thousands of these alert, swift-moving zeros, all swarming in the direction of the city and its stench of living things.
The sun was not long up in the sky when she saw another phenomenon that made her pull up onto an overpass raised on concrete pillars high in the air. Half Moon Bay Road, the sign said. She stopped the Humvee. She was fairly safe inside the vehicle, which had a fully enclosed cab, but it was extremely dangerous to be out in the open. There was a backpack on the floor of the passenger side. Danny found a couple of vacuum-packed meals in there, a copy of Car and Driver, two clips of 9mm ammunition, and a pair of compact binoculars.
Danny checked her position carefully before she emerged, the overpass giving her a commanding view of several miles of road in both directions. She climbed up on the roof, carefully because her legs were weak as a newborn foal’s, and sighted through the binoculars.
Danny didn’t know exactly where she was. The road was on high ground. Downhill from the freeway were master-planned subdivisions, identical houses on streets that branched into ever-smaller streets, like limbs on a tree. Beyond that was the bay. On the other side was a long, narrow reservoir fringed with trees. It butted up against forested hills. Danny had seen something happening out among the houses that made her wonder. She saw it for mile after mile, and still couldn’t comprehend it. So now she searched the distant streets with the binoculars.
They were there.
The figures she discerned were tiny, this far away, but she could see they were upright, human—the undead. In some places there were one or two of them; in other places, hundreds had gathered.
They were all facing north. All of them. Danny sought out the nearest streets, not far from her elevated position, and there were more of them there. She feathered the focus ring and now she could see the faces of the nearest ones. They were chomping. Or rather, they were clacking their jaws. They looked like wooden puppets, nutcrackers, mouths snapping open and shut. Now she thought she could even hear the sound, which she had originally believed to be the rustling of grass. It was the snapping of hundreds of thousands of hungry teeth. All biting at the air, all facing north, all aimed toward the city.
9
Since the incident that morning, Murdo was never without a pistol in his hand. Discipline with his men had broken down completely by midday. They were arguing among themselves. There was a fistfight between Ace and Parker, Ace accusing Parker of siding with the slain woman because she was “half coon.”
Murdo brooded alone in the control tower for several hours. The civilians were rounded up and locked down in the dining room, with guards on every exit. It was Reese and Boudreau who carried Cammy out of the ladies’ room, wrapped in a plastic dropcloth, her bloodless, yellow-gray feet protruding from the polyethylene. Maria demanded to know what they were going to do with her.
“She’s dead,” Boudreau replied, as if Maria was suggesting necrophilia. They wrestled the bound corpse across the parking lot, threading between their hulking vehicles. Estevez unlocked the gates and they carried Cammy’s body away out into the scrubland. Both men came running back into the compound within a minute and a half, reporting to their compatriots before Reese trotted up into the conning tower to inform Murdo.
None of the civilians could see what the fuss was about, but the normally macho men were clearly shaken. The dining room was on the runway side of the building; none of the windows looked out on the front gates. As it was, the civilians didn’t have long to wait before the news reached them. Estevez climbed into the M1117 ASV and manned the gun turret and when Murdo came down out of the tower, he shouted, “Zeros!” and pointed out into the desert.
There were gunshots. Several of the survivors got down on the floor. Pfeiffer posted a lookout by the window.
“They’re shooting outside the fence,” she said.
Minutes later, the mercenaries came back in, this time with Murdo among them, chest out, head thrown back. They had their old swagger back, as if they’d been out hunting bear.
“You’ll be glad to know,” Murdo said, in a too-loud, expansive voice, “We took care of about ten zeros that were on their way here for the free buffet.” He looked around at the civilians as if he expected them to thank him. He met the hostile eyes and took a step backward, then drew himself up to his modest full height.
“Let’s all try to remember that we had an accident here. An unfortunate accident. But now we saved all your lives. We did it without hesitation, we did it without making any demands out of you people. We did our duty as sworn contractors to the United States government, if any. I didn’t come back in here expecting to be hailed as a conquering hero. But I do
expect you people to show some fucking respect for the men who just saved your asses.”
By the end of his speech his face was red and he had his head thrust forward again in that characteristic, belligerent posture that was his natural stance. Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Then Linda Maas, who seemed to have found some inner fire, stood up and raised her hand. Without waiting to be acknowledged by Murdo, she said, “Were they attracted by the smell of fresh meat? Was it the body out there? You creeps didn’t even bury her, did you.”
“We didn’t have time,” Reese shouted, at the top of his lungs. His hand rose up to rest on the pommel of his automatic. Murdo stepped in front of Reese with his back to the civilians.
“You listen here,” Murdo said to Reese, but for the general audience. “These people are spoiled, soft, and ungrateful: Civilians are like that everywhere in the world. They don’t know the cost in blood, sweat, and tears it takes to bring peace to a troubled land, you hear me?” By now Murdo was inches from Reese, looking up into the taller man’s face with glittering, bloodshot eyes. “Now you and me, we get no respect. We’re not Army. We’re not Marines or Air Force or Navy.”
Murdo stepped back so he could take in all his men with an encompassing look, warming to his speech. He placed his hand on Reese’s arm and squeezed.
“Hell, we’re not even National Guard.” This got a laugh out of the mercenaries. Murdo continued, on a roll now.
“We’re plain old Americans, except we have a code. A code of discipline and loyalty and duty. In all this excitement, hell, we made mistakes. Freedom isn’t free. But”—here he thrust a blunt finger heavenward—“the highest authority will forgive us what happens on the bloody fields of war, because it’s not the dead that mourn, it’s the living. Let’s remember that. We mourn the dead. Fuck if I’m not mourning the dead right now, right here in my heart. And I will kill the first cocksucker says otherwise.”
“So, what happens now?” Amy asked. This speech of his was leading somewhere.
