by Ben Tripp
Also, Danny could hear the moaning. There were undead moving through the dark brush all around her. They would be changing course, heading in her direction. This was going to have to be a short conversation, one way or the other.
She tried again, guessing where “headquarters” would be for this man.
“I was just in San Francisco,” she said. “It’s gone.”
“Bullshit,” he said, but Danny could tell he was rattled.
“The zombies—the zeros—are getting faster,” she added.
“You’re a world-class bullshitter,” the man said.
Danny didn’t feel like pursuing that line of discussion.
“Look, mister,” she said. “If Amy Cutter left, where is everybody else? They in the Whale?”
“The Whale?” The man was looking at his comrade now. They were whispering.
“The motor home there,” Danny amended. “You’re taking it. I’d like to see who’s inside.”
“They all left,” Murdo said.
“I’m Sheriff Adelman. Who are you?”
“Squad Leader Murdo. Hawkstone Security.”
“So, Murdo,” Danny said, pronouncing his name like it was stuck to her boot, “what I want to know is this: Under what authority have you taken control of this location? What have you done with the civilians? We’re on American soil. These are American citizens. They got some rights and you got some restrictions. Posse comitatus and shit.”
Murdo shook his head. “The entire fucking nation is under martial law, Sheriff. Section ten-seventy-six. Posse comitatus is suspended.”
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass,” Danny said, anger giving her voice wings. She wanted to go right up there and get eyeball-to-eyeball with this prick. Maybe even shoot him. “That crap was repealed in ’08. I know the law. You don’t know shit.”
Murdo scuffed the ground with his toe, then laughed. It sounded like an effort. “I’m gonna give you count of ten to decide whether you’re coming or going, okay? We’re on a timetable.” He pantomime-tapped his watch.
Then he whispered something to the gunner in the turret of the ASV. The gunner nodded and hunched over his weapon. Danny knew the posture well—he was braced to open fire.
At that moment, the terminal door banged open and Amy came hammering out of the building, shouting and waving her arms. Danny’s heart squeezed halfway up her throat. Amy was alive. She was right there, and these bugfuckers were in the way.
“Danny, go! Go, go, go!” Amy shouted, and now one of the uniformed men was running at her from the Humvee and Amy was down on the ground.
Fury burst inside Danny’s head: Her friend was being attacked, and she couldn’t do anything about it. In fact, she needed to retreat now. That upgraded 20mm cannon would blow her apart like a dog-food balloon. She’d seen it in the war. A single round could pass through Danny, the Mustang’s engine block, and the rest of the vehicle, yet still have enough power left to punch a two-foot pothole in the road.
She was already throwing herself into the Mustang when the big gun opened up and the world around her turned to hell.
She’d kept the Mustang idling and the door open. The first burst from the 20mm cannon went high. The supersonic crack of the rounds passing overhead at thirty-four hundred feet per second had Danny instinctively bent double as she leaped behind the wheel. Her left foot was still on the ground when she slammed the old Pony into reverse and slapped the accelerator to the floor. In a stinking cloud of tire smoke, she twisted the wheel around and the car reversed itself. The rear window and the windshield simultaneously exploded and the driver’s side door, which was still swinging open, let out a deafening bang as one of the 20mm rounds whacked through it. The window glass turned to snow. Danny braced herself with her left hand on the windshield pillar to keep from being thrown out of the car as she bashed the shifter forward. The car got traction and jumped up the road. Danny was losing Amy and the Mustang to these sons of bitches.
She yanked the steering wheel left and right, fishtailing the car even as it accelerated, to break up the gunner’s aim. The road ahead of her leaped into the glow of the headlights as if struck by a tornado, the heavy gun blowing the pavement apart. She pulled the wheel over and drove the Mustang off the road, into the brush. It was never going to be the same car again, but this was no time to worry about the paint job.
It had been eight seconds since the first burst of cannon fire and Danny was still alive.
She whipped the car through the rough desert brush, caught a zombie in the headlights, smashed it into the air over the hood, and now she had one headlamp, not two. She should douse the lights, she realized. But then they could see her taillights and she wouldn’t be able to see shit. She kept on driving and wondered why the cannon wasn’t turning the entire desert into a blizzard of steel.
There were zeros coming toward her through the bush. It had been fifteen seconds, and she was still alive.
Then she heard the bark of a grenade launcher. The first burst of fire came down in a tight formation close in front of the Mustang, and the desert floor was blasted into the air, rocks and dirt and bushes at once. Danny drove, blinded by smoke and debris, into the explosions. The Mustang was choked by leaves and dust. The second salvo came down behind the car—except for the grenade that erupted beneath the rear axle.
Everything turned upside-down. The Mustang, the liquor, the first-aid gear, the hoard of ammunition and weapons and food and whatever crap Danny thought she might possibly need on a road trip through the zombie-infested American landscape. Gravity disappeared, then came back in the wrong direction.
Danny was caught by the force of the blast and thrown against the steering wheel, then whiplashed back into the seat, and then she was flung at the ceiling because down was up. The Mustang slammed on its side into the dirt, upside-down, and slid down an eight-foot drainage ditch, until Danny could almost rest her head on the ground below. Red flames lit the world up. It was all red and black and yellow. Nothing else.
Half-deaf, half-blind, and nearly senseless from the impact, Danny tucked her knees up under her and slid her feet through the empty frame of the driver’s side door window. It couldn’t have been more than three feet down to the bottom of the culvert she’d landed in. But she couldn’t get free of the car. She needed to figure out why, because there were zombies and militiamen trying to kill her.
A high, clear note rang in her ears, and there was pressure in her head as if she was at the bottom of a swimming pool. Her thoughts were scrambled like old-fashioned television reception from the predigital days.
What was keeping her dangling under the car? Somehow her arm had gotten hooked around her chest. Her left arm, twisted around. Danny tried to reason the thing out. Something else exploded nearby, but she wasn’t concerned about that. She attempted to get her arm free of the obstruction. No go. So she used her right hand to feel out what the problem might be, and now she understood. She had been holding the A pillar, the one that rose up from hood to roof and held the windshield in. The door had been open, then, banging on her knuckles.
Now the door was firmly closed, jammed tight against the stony wall of the culvert. But her fingers were still wrapped around the A pillar. That posed an insoluble problem to Danny’s fuddled mind. The Mustang had become like a great big rat trap, and Danny was trapped in it. She smelled gasoline. She loved the smell of gasoline on a man. But not the smell of gasoline running out of the Mustang, especially as the car was on fire.
The threat of fire combined with the stink of gas cleared Danny’s head enough so she could panic. Things couldn’t get much worse. She needed to pry the door open and release her crushed fingers, which she expected was going to hurt like a motherfucker. Otherwise she was going to be burned alive, which was the Thing She Feared Most. So Danny groped around her for something to get the door open with. There were tools on her belt. Nothing that would fit in the gap of the door. Unless the barrel of her revolver. She pulled the weapon from the holste
r.
Pain was beginning to converge on her shoulder where her weight hung awkwardly on the trapped arm. She strained to get one knee on the window frame of the door and the other foot on the ground. Now she had a little leverage. She got the barrel of the gun into the rumpled gap between door and roof. She pried at it with all her weight. The gun was coming apart. She was bending the frame around the cylinder. The door shifted slightly. She could flex her fingers. Then the Mustang settled another half-inch, and Danny saw the gap tighten on her hand. The skin of her left index finger split open like a frying sausage.
She needed to make a plan come together fast, or she was definitely going to die.
Danny tried prying the door open again. Now the barrel of the gun wouldn’t even fit in the gap. The space was half the width of her fingers. She heard herself whimpering, and made it stop. Now she could hear the moaning, out in the darkness.
Danny lowered her head down below the roof of the Mustang so she could see along the length of the culvert, lit by burning creosote bushes and fragrant mesquite. Two zeros were lurching in her direction, bent silhouettes in the leaping firelight.
She couldn’t come up with a plan. By fire or teeth, she was going to die in the wreckage of her beloved 1968 Mustang unless she got herself clear of the vehicle, and her left hand was jammed into a sandwich of steel less than three-eighths of an inch wide.
Danny knew what she needed to do. All the bright hope inside her was still there, but she couldn’t use it for anything. Someday, everybody had to die, and this was her day.
She raised the revolver to her temple, and didn’t think any grand last thoughts, or send up a prayer to God, or even say good-bye to Kelley’s memory. It was easier than that. She squeezed the trigger to send the fat bullet through her head, to blot out the stink of gasoline and the flames and the biting jaws that were coming for her.
The gun didn’t fire.
She’d distorted the frame so much the hammer wouldn’t fall.
Danny fumbled at her belt and found the knife she’d gotten in San Francisco. That was something. She could cut her throat. Or—Danny’s pain-clouded mind saw a possibility. It was as bad an idea as she’d ever had, but it was better than cutting her throat.
Danny took the nickel-plated handcuffs from her belt, let the jaws fall open, and snapped them onto her left wrist, one bracelet at a time. The pain in her trapped fingers was unbelievable, filling the world. She cinched the cuffs tight. They ratcheted down until the bracelets sank into the skin of her arm. Still she squeezed them, until the flesh wouldn’t compress anymore and she was working against the density of her own wrist bones. That would have to do. She could feel the pulse hammering in her arm against this obstacle, these constricting bands of steel. Good. Danny reached down with her good hand and drew out the knife.
The nearest zombie was twenty yards away, at most. There were several more behind it, lurching down the ditch toward the fire. The smoke from burning tires and gasoline was choking her. It didn’t seem as if the gas tank was going to explode. It was going to burn itself out, which could take all night roasting her, but meanwhile flaming gasoline was streaming down the rear frame of the car, spattering in bright flaring droplets into the boiling pool of motor oil collected near Danny’s foot. The heat was intense.
There was a rhythmic thumping in her ears, like a helicopter passing overhead. It was her own heartbeat. Danny raised the blade of the knife, a good sharp edge four inches long with a few serrations down by the hilt. It was a tight space, but she was able to get the blade in close to where her fingers were crushed against the frame of the Mustang. She held her breath. Thrust the knife into the gap. Blood spilled out despite the handcuffs, and a wire of white-hot agony snapped across Danny’s brain.
She dropped the knife.
It bounced to the ground and skittered away under the roof of the car. Danny couldn’t reach it. Her heart contracted to a pinpoint. She had nothing left to free herself from the coffin the Mustang had become.
Teeth.
Danny grasped her handcuffed wrist and stretched the flesh back as far as she could. She maneuvered her jaws until her teeth were jammed against the frame of the Mustang. Her knuckle, salty with blood, was between her lips. Danny thrust her head forward and bit down. The pain was so much bigger than her hand, crushed into its outline with punishing force.
She jammed her teeth into her flesh with strength renewed by fear, and the skin broke. Blood flowed. There was meat under there, rubbery cables, then the hard joint. She worked her teeth between the two bones that made up her knuckle. They fit together so closely. There was a pop when she forced them apart.
She chewed until she was choking in her own blood, the pain making her writhe. At last the finger snapped away from her hand. The zombies were so close, moaning with hunger, but they hadn’t reached her yet.
Danny got through three of her fingers before she was released from the Mustang.
She fell to the dirt floor of the ditch and tucked her mutilated limb up against her chest. The sole of her boot was on fire. She crawled away from the blazing motor oil and hunched herself along. But the zeros were there. So after all that, she was going to get torn apart anyway.
She struggled to her feet. The boot, at least, wasn’t burning anymore. There was a transcendental giddiness in her, now, all the pain and terror like vast electrified wings that could bear her away. The zero was there. It reached out to her, almost in welcome, its mouth open, teeth exposed—she could see the firelight reflecting off the back of its mottled throat—and then its head blew clean off its shoulders. A comical little spurt of black blood popped up from the ragged meat of its neck and the thing collapsed.
Then a great, dark shape leaped down from the upper world above the culvert—a shaggy, ugly thing with a wild, broken face. Danny did the only thing left. She blacked out.
1
Amy got her butt kicked. There was no question about that. It was almost worth it, the way Danny hightailed it like a jackrabbit back to that beautiful old stupid Mustang of hers. Danny did a fancy dive into the car and it was moving before she was even all the way in. Then the guy with the face tattoos was shooting at Danny with his huge tank gun, buk-buk-buk-buk. Danny got the car spun all the way around back to front and hit the gas. Amy could hear people shouting inside the motor home. Then Reese was pounding Amy silly and she couldn’t really look anymore because she was taking a severe beating.
Reese stopped hitting her in order to watch the shooting. Murdo was screaming in a high-pitched voice and jumping up and down, waving his fists. The flame from the huge cannon leaped ten feet from the barrel. The lights of the Mustang turned from crisp outlines into dim glows as the landscape blew up around it.
Amy could hear metallic hammering noises, and assumed that was Danny getting blown to pieces. Amy was so used to Danny turning back up again—from that motorcycle accident when she was young, then from the war, and the war again, and another war, and now, coming back from her mission in the world of the undead—that she didn’t experience shock or grief, but disbelief. This couldn’t be it.
Danny couldn’t finally be gone.
Then it looked as if Amy’s faith was vindicated. Danny took the Mustang off-road, so much dust kicked up you couldn’t even see where it was. It was like a smokescreen, and the gun was shooting up all over the place but they could still hear the Mustang’s engine roaring away out there like a wounded bear. Danny was so smart, especially if everything was going wrong—she wasn’t so good in a noncrisis but this was right up her alley.
The shooting stopped. Where they going to let Danny go? Please let it stop, Amy thought. You have no idea what she’s been through. Then there was a ching-thud, ching-thud sound, two bursts of ten repetitions each, and a long moment later the desert blew up. They were shooting bombs at Danny. There was an explosion, and Amy saw the shape of the Mustang flip end-over-end, silhouetted against the halo of fire, and then it dropped into the flames and smoke and dirt an
d that was that.
Reese kicked Amy one more time, spat on her, and walked away, whooping with triumph. Murdo himself was hollering victory, clapping. Boudreau stood there watching the fires out in the desert, framed squarely in the gateway to the airfield. His posture was one of satisfaction, like a weary man admiring the snug house he had just finished building. Amy felt real hatred for these men. Hate and rage weren’t things she understood, but they had roosted inside her and she was going to have to deal with them. They wanted her to hurt and kill, to get revenge. That’s all the world had in it. Amy rejected these things, but the feeling, the black rage, burned on, like the fires in the desert that marked Danny’s grave.
Murdo clapped Boudreau on the shoulder as he walked toward the ASV. Boudreau rocked his fist in the air. They were yelling many things to each other. Apparently, they were the winners.
Then Boudreau’s ear blew off and he lurched backward and fell to the ground, dead, his skull emptied out by a high-velocity round. A second later they heard the gunshot. Murdo threw himself into the dirt, covered in blood and brains, and crawled under the ASV. Two more shots snapped through the night, but nobody else was hit. Reese sprinted inside the terminal building. The gates were still wide open, and now above the whoosh and crackle of the flames out in the desert they could hear the moaning. Undead were coming. Zeros.
Amy didn’t feel as good as she usually did. She had never been physically beaten before, beyond the occasional parental spanking. It wasn’t the pain so much as the fear it wouldn’t stop.
Reese had clearly gone easy on her. He couldn’t incapacitate the medic, veterinarian or not: He was only trying to slow her down. Which had the opposite effect, of course. If he couldn’t afford to kill her, she could afford to give him the bird. Still, she was very sore. She felt a fresh wave of empathy for Patrick and didn’t blame him for having a nice, quiet coma.
