by Ben Tripp
“Do you remember what happened?” he continued. “If one of those undead things did this, you could have some kind of infection…” he trailed off, leaving it unspoken. They could both guess what would happen.
“I don’t remember anything after seeing the airfield down the road. There was somebody there. That’s it. How long ago was that?”
“Two days,” Patrick said, as if admitting something shameful.
“Two fuckin’ days?” Danny wanted to sit up again. Patrick held her down with both hands. She lacked the strength to resist, and fell asleep again.
When Danny awoke, the sun was close to rising. She kept her eyes shut and started thinking about her new situation.
She felt she was at some kind of crossroads. She knew guys, people in rehab, soldiers and Marines dealing all the time with the Veterans’ Administration, who were missing a hand, or both hands, or a foot or a couple of legs. Eyes, faces, what have you, missing. They spent so much of their time trying to increase the amount they were considered legally disabled. This was the “percentage.” Twenty percent got you a certain stipend every month. Thirty, fifty, eighty percent disabled: They were all worth increasing sums. At a hundred percent you could practically live on the money the government allowed you, except of course you spent it all on the iron lung and diapers. Danny couldn’t get a thin dime once she could walk again, because she had been deemed fully recovered. The VA didn’t give a shit if you were ugly and deformed, as long as you could theoretically go out and get a job cleaning bedpans.
But now she was properly disabled. She was sporting half the stock number of hands. She had phantom limb syndrome, and everything—her nonexistent fingers continued to itch. She could probably get a handicap tag for the Mustang.
A tremor of doubt rattled through her mind. The Mustang. There was some question about the car, but she couldn’t remember what it was.
The reverie fell apart. Danny wasn’t fooling herself. She knew that even if there still was a Veterans’ Administration (she thought of Harlan again, presumably rotting away in a bed, untended), even if parking was ever an issue again, she wasn’t somebody who could call herself handicapped. She was going to have to put this thing behind her. She was going to have to figure out a system for living the same way she was before, only one-handed. Which shouldn’t be difficult, the voice said. It never slept. You weren’t living very well before. She had lost a part of herself, and come out alive. She was stronger than ever, because she had even less to lose.
She knew it was the painkillers, but Danny was exhilarated by this weird new situation. She had to share the moment with somebody. She didn’t feel loss, as she expected to do. She didn’t resent having to chew off her own fingers. Rather she felt impossibly alive. She felt irreducible. What she was had been reduced to its absolute essence, then reduced again, and then she was supposed to die. She didn’t die. So everything ahead of her was extra time.
Danny rolled over on her good elbow and shook Patrick.
“Hey,” she said, in an urgent whisper.
“What is it,” Patrick whispered back.
“I’m invincible.”
She passed out again. By midday, she had a raging fever.
Patrick kept asking for cool cloths to wipe Danny down, and the others kept bringing him filthy shop rags. Danny’s face was getting progressively dirtier as the fever expanded, but if Patrick left her alone for ten minutes, her sweat flushed most of the grime off. He’d given her some oral antibiotics they’d found, but of course knowing nothing about antibiotics, Patrick might be treating her for malaria, for all he knew. Whatever the stuff was, it didn’t seem to be helping.
Am I in love with this weather-beaten woman? Patrick wondered, as he tried again to rouse Danny enough to drink something. Stranger things had happened. Were happening, all over the world. No, he decided. He loved her, which wasn’t the same. But it was still a big deal.
Danny was talking again. The fever brought up whatever was stewing in her subconscious, like dragging the bottom of a swamp with an oar. She murmured a great deal of gibberish, and sometimes spoke of her sister Kelley. Never to her. She spoke directly to Patrick when she recognized him, to the Amy in her mind’s eye at other times; she spoke to someone named Zero Killer, and even once to Weaver, begging him to get down. But Kelley was in the past now. Patrick kept her cool as he could, and frequently changed the looted thrift-store shirts tucked beneath her to serve as diapers. It remained a miracle to Patrick how often women could pee. Danny was starting to stink, Patrick realized. Not like body odor or the sickbed, but a rotten smell, like death.
Danny’s stump of hand had swelled to three times its original diameter. There was no question: That was where the stink was coming from. The wounds, which Patrick had sewn shut himself as he’d seen Amy do, were weeping and purple where the stitches dug in, but turning gray at the edges. He was losing her. After all that Danny had been through, after all the enemies she had faced, it was the microscopic army that was going to beat her.
“Hey, Topper, heat me up a sharp piece of wire,” Patrick said. “Like redhot.”
Topper took one look at Danny’s hand, said, “Oh Jesus fuck,” and walked away, shaking his head.
“It don’t half fuckin’ stink,” Ernie said, handing the sterilized wire to Patrick at arm’s length.
Patrick examined the bulb of Danny’s hand, swollen now to the size of her folded knee, purple and hot to the touch. He was wasting time. Go for it. There was a moon-shaped hubcap in his lap, upturned like a salad bowl. He held Danny’s limp arm over the basin formed by the hubcap, then—with a sharp inhalation—he thrust the sharpened wire into the palm of Danny’s hand.
It popped.
An incredible quantity of stinking, bloody pus spurted out, marbled with whorls of amber and greenish cream. It spattered his secondhand jeans, then the stream lost pressure and steadied. The stench made him want very much to throw up. He swallowed and kept swallowing, but he couldn’t help crying out. He said “oh, God, oh, my God,” over and over. The liquid continued to run out, until it was dribbling. Much as he would rather have been stabbed to death with chopsticks, Patrick changed his grip on the purulent wound and started milking the puffy flesh. Gobs of congealed pus belched out of the puncture. Things that looked like chewed fat. Finally the wound ran blood. Patrick let it bleed for a minute, then doused the whole red mess in alcohol and wrapped it back up with fresh white bandage.
The hubcap in his lap was almost full. The hot liquid sloshed over his thumb as Patrick carried it away and poured it down a storm drain in the pavement. Then he vomited down the drain, and stayed like that with his head dangling and his hands on his knees for several minutes. Topper came by and slapped him on the back.
“You done a hell of a thing,” Topper said. “Fuckin’ Florence Fuckin’ Nightingale, man.”
“After all that she better not die,” Patrick said, and heaved again.
Danny didn’t die. It had been four days since she bit herself free of the Mustang. She was feeling much better. Damn good, even. The fever broke, the black clouds that raged and stormed inside her mind cleared away, and despite the gleaming pain she began to ask questions in earnest. That was the men’s best proof that she was going to survive. She wanted to know what the plan was.
The men had come to this place only an hour or two after they were banished. The junkyard was located behind a butte of rock at the base of the mountains, separated from the airfield by a foothill upon which the airfield was backed. If you scaled the butte, which was not difficult because the stacked cars made an effective stairway up its flank, there was a flat place from which you could see the airfield with binoculars—or better yet, the Celestria eight-inch telescope they’d set up for that purpose. As Topper enthusiastically explained, because the bulk of the plan was his, they were currently beefing up a 9C1 Chevy Impala, the police car they’d found abandoned down the road. Danny remembered it: There had been an old, wizened zombie in the back.<
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“She looked like fuckin’ King Tut, but she was still kicking,” Topper chuckled. “I made Ernie do the braining on that one.”
They had made some modifications to the basic police package that Topper thought Danny would like. In addition, they had an old Ford pickup running, not to mention Patrick’s fire truck, and there were a couple of adequate Harleys that didn’t need much work to be roadworthy. The plan was to creep up on the airfield at night, lights off, then all of a sudden ram the fence from the side behind the terminal building—not at the gates, where the grenade launcher and the 20mm cannon presented an obstacle, let alone about four hundred zombies. The rest of them would get in there through the gap and start killing anybody over six foot.
Along with her health, Danny’s memory had returned. Not all of it, but she could now remember the early part of the confrontation she’d had with the Hawkstone men. And that the Mustang had gone to Pony Heaven.
“Their leader is five-nine at the most,” Danny said, remembering Murdo.
She heard the plan out. It was suicidal, violent, and likely to result in civilian casualties, failure, and death, in that order. But it was a hell of a plan, nonetheless. Something bothered Danny, though.
“They were leaving when I got there. Where were they going? Did they say?” Danny asked.
“Their command was supposed to be in Potter,” Patrick volunteered.
Danny tossed her good hand in the air. “It isn’t. Do they know that?”
Patrick shrugged. “They don’t know anything.”
“Potter is a deathtrap,” Danny barked. Something was bothering her, some fact that didn’t fit the picture. “Wait a minute,” she eventually said. “It’s four days later. How come they’re still at the airfield?”
Topper took off his greasy Kenworth gimme-cap and scratched the thin, scraggly hair underneath.
“That’s where old Wulfie come in,” Topper said. He looked uneasy. He clearly knew Danny might not approve of this part of the plan. But he bravely continued.
“See, Wolfman lit out right before those fuckwads showed up, right? He just disappeared the way he does. And he was like livin’ on jackrabbits in the brush, because there weren’t that many zombies around at the time. Watching the airfield. Never more than five hundred yards away and them twats didn’t even know he was there. And he had his rifle, too. So when we got tossed out on our asses, he followed us here and we met up and told him the deal, and I already had this idea going, right? And he said he’d keep ’em there long as he could until we had ourselves set up.”
“You guys,” Danny said, shaking her head.
“So days are going by, right?” Topper was warming to his narrative. “Wulf is down there watching and he comes and briefs us on the intel from the field. He hears shouting sometimes. Then a few mornings back he hears a gunshot and that black chick with the little baby gets carried out dead. Those cocksuckers left her on the ground and ran. Once it was dark, Wulf buried her with rocks. By that time the zombies were showing up by the dozen, so he had to retreat to high ground, but that rifle of yours got a real good fuckin’ scope on it. Wulf could see just fine. He sees they’re pulling out. So he come back here and tells us about it and I says to him, shit, we’re not ready. So he says he figures he can slow ’em down.”
“Slow them down?” Danny said, and Topper heard the disapproval again. But he pressed on.
“Well, see that’s where you come in. We were gonna put our plan in action—when all of a sudden the long-lost Sheriff Adelman pulls up to the airfield in a fine example of vintage American iron. Then those pricks blew you off the map. We’re all real sorry about the ’Stang, incidentally. Wulf was right there. He saw it all happen not two hundred yards away.”
“Three hundred,” Ernie added.
“Three hundred,” Topper amended. “You fucked up my story, Ernie.”
“Sorry, Topper.”
“Mind if I continue?”
“Please.”
“So Wulf is right there under a quarter-mile away,” Topper went on. Danny enjoyed simply hearing their voices, being among people she knew. They shared something. They survived together.
“He took a chance and crawled to your position,” Topper said. “Fuckin’ zombies were right there on you, practically. You’re hung up under the car, then you’re doing something, and before he gets to you you’re free. He thought you were a zombie for a minute on account of what you done. Them cuffs was a good idea. He said your hand didn’t bleed hardly at all. The Wolfman took out the zombies and carried you off a safe ways. Calls us to come quick, no lights.”
“How are you communicating this whole time?” Danny asked.
Ernie produced a toy plastic walkie-talkie in a magenta case with stickers of a cartoon girl all over it.
“We got these at the store,” Ernie said. “Toy department. You couldn’t talk from one end of the trailer to the other with them goddamn toy radios we had when I was a kid, but these new ones got a good range on ’em. But the range ain’t so good you can hear the whole way. So we done relays with ’em.”
“That was Ernie’s idea,” Topper said. “He ain’t as stupid as he smells. We set up a daisy chain with the radios: Wulf talks on the first one, we got a man halfway back gets Wulf’s message, and he talks on the next one to send the message to our lookout, up top.” Topper gestured to the butte, where Martin the skinny college kid was crouching above them.
“Go keep watch, for chrissakes,” Topper shouted, catching sight of Martin. Martin walked away out of view across the top of the butte.
“Man, we’re as bad as those pukes down at the airfield,” Topper added, then went on, “Tell you the truth, Wulf was real mad about what happened to you. He shot one of those fuckers in the head right after he found you, just outta spite, and that give us all the idea to keep ’em where we want ’em. Any time one of them peckerwipes shows his self, we shoot him. Shit, they keep peeking out the windows, they might run out of men before we’re even ready to move on the plan.”
Having heard the whole story, what Danny meant to say was: What an extraordinary series of actions. What an unprecedented situation. It is thought-provoking. I am impressed, and I am compelled.
What she said was, “Fuck.” And again, thoughtfully: “Fuck.”
They knew what she meant.
Danny ate for the first time in days, and ate well. Macaroni and cheese from a box, followed by cocktail franks from a jar. Then she felt sick, but it stayed down, and the next thing was thirst. She wanted beer, something cheap and American if they had it, but no light beer. Patrick brought her three large bottles of sparkling water. She complained, then drank all three bottles inside forty minutes. A while later she belched with such force that Ernie came to see what the noise was, a welding mask propped up on his forehead.
“Nice one, Sheriff,” he said, and went back through the piles of wrecked cars to report the occasion to Topper.
Danny was back under the old car hull. It was a 1939 Buick, she had determined. Patrick was on radio relay duty at the listening post out in the desert, a spot relatively zombie-safe because it had an eight-foot cliff on one side and an old cow pen with heavy wire along the other. Still, an anxiety-producing place to be. Easily surrounded.
Topper came by to visit Danny; he was reeking of ozone from the arc welder in the shed. They were going to move her to the living quarters next, but they wanted her to be able to walk on her own. She thought she probably could. The men were shacked up inside a corrugated iron Quonset hut around the corner, where the interior parts and upholstery were kept by the previous owners; the men were sleeping on bench seats scavenged from old trucks. It was a bachelor’s paradise, except for the absence of good-looking ladies. Pardon the implication, Topper added.
“I dunno how you survive all this,” Topper mused.
“It’s got me stumped, too,” Danny said, and waited. When Topper didn’t laugh, she prodded him with her good elbow.
“That’s ju
st wrong,” Topper said.
Danny cawed with laughter. It wasn’t a pretty laugh—it sounded like somebody sawing a sheet of tin, in fact—but then again, she wasn’t accustomed to laughing.
Danny wanted very much to get into action. Her friends were down there. She couldn’t remember what directly preceded her getting blown up and performing the self-amputation, but she knew Amy was in trouble. Danny remembered that she had seen her friend alive, but not what she saw. There were the stories of what had happened before, as well. The mercenaries from Hawkstone had beaten Patrick almost to death, and killed the young mother. For all Danny knew the baby was dead, too. According to the reports from Wulf, three Hawkstone men were dead or wounded, although one of them might have been somebody else dressed as a soldier, he had to admit. Danny admired the old man’s candor. He might have shot a noncombatant; his bad, he accepted full responsibility.
He also knew there wasn’t a working jail or courthouse on the West Coast.
Later, Danny tried to figure out how to eat with one hand. There was no physical rehabilitation anymore; she would have to invent new ways of doing a lot of things. Patrick knelt beside her and produced a rumpled plastic bag from his back pocket.
Inside was Kelley’s note.
“You had it on you. Your uniform is cleaned up, too,” Patrick said. Danny was touched. Only he would have bothered.
“I heard they beat you up pretty good and left you down at the airfield,” Danny said. “How come you’re here?”
Patrick drew invisible circles on the pavement with a piece of automotive trim.
“Those guys, those fake soldiers,” Patrick said. “Murdo, the boss? He hated me. I think he was latent. He chose me for his special enemy. They all kept fucking with me. It was so obvious they wanted to make an example out of me, and I was so like, no way. Not happening. But even that upset them.
