by Ben Tripp
“I don’t remember getting my ass kicked, thankfully,” Patrick continued. “I don’t even remember the next like three or four days.”
They sat in silence for a while, then Patrick made a couple of false starts at speaking. He wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the right way to put it.
“Why did you go?” he finally said.
Danny shook her head. “My sister. I was crazy to find her. I had to try. If it had been Weaver—you know what I mean?”
“You went out to look for her.”
“All the way to San Francisco. She’s gone. It’s all gone. I realized out there, there’s nothing left. Each other is all we got. It sounds gay, I know. I mean—”
“I know what you mean.”
“Anyway, I shouldn’t have left you guys.”
“I guess you didn’t have a choice.” Patrick didn’t sound convinced, but Danny knew she didn’t have the right to insist on understanding. What had happened to him—and to all of the survivors—was as much her responsibility as it was the mercenaries’.
Out of her emotional depth, she changed the subject. “So what happened?”
“I woke up the next day. I was marinating in my own pee, but I was all bandaged up, so I know Amy was taking care of me. What happened was I was staring at this godawful spray-on acoustic ceiling material, and then one of them comes in, one of these Hawkstone gangsters. The Italian one. He takes one look at me like I’m worthless, and then he peeks out the window. Half an hour later he comes in and does it again. This time the boss is with him, this guy named Murdo. He’s such an overcompensator.”
“Was he the short one?”
“Total Porsche driver. He tells me I’m lucky I’m even alive, which is debatable based on the state my beautiful face is in. Then he tells me somebody is shooting at us, and he wants to know who. He thinks it was Topper. Of course I hadn’t the foggiest, and I told him that. He comes over to smack me some more and just then Amy arrives and tells him if he hits me, I’ll die. He says, so fucking what. I kid you not, his exact words. So fucking what. And right then, the window breaks. I thought the Italian Stallion broke it, but he’s going like this—”
Here, Patrick pantomimed pressing his stomach with the heel of both hands.
“—And he falls down. And I had no idea that much blood could come out of somebody. It was unbelievable. He got shot, right then and there, just like Murdo said. Amy did whatever she was doing, tried to stop the bleeding, but she said it must have gone through his liver or something. He kept trying to fight her off. Then he died.”
“So how many of them are left, as far as you know?” Danny was caught up in the narrative, but she was also building up her calculations, adding in factors, trying to come up with a way to spring the others out of captivity that didn’t involve making a big hole in the fence for zeros to get through. Patrick shrugged.
“Murdo. Parker, this guy with a neck like this. Reese and Flamingo. Don’t ask where he got his name. There’s this psychopath called Ace, Amy told me he killed Cammy, the one with the baby? And there’s Jones, this wounded one that Amy patched up. That’s what started the whole thing.”
Danny hadn’t heard the story of Jones, yet. Patrick told her about it, and everything else that had happened. It took much of the afternoon. By that time, most of the other men were fairly drunk and shouting obscenities, roaring with laughter as they carried parts back and forth and clanged around with hammers and built whatever it was they were building.
Patrick was watching Danny’s face. She didn’t like the scrutiny. He seemed to be looking for something that ought to be there, but wasn’t.
“I found the Mustang in Potter,” Danny said, for the sake of breaking the silence. “End of the trail. After that, Kelley was gone. Dead or alive, I don’t know.” It all seemed so long ago.
“Then you went to San Francisco. And did what?”
“Nothing,” Danny said, and meant it. The whole journey had been a waste of time. What happened wasn’t worth recounting.
“I went for a swim in the ocean,” Danny added, her voice freighted with guilt.
“You should have stayed,” Patrick said, and contained within that small statement was the world of unintended consequences Danny had unleashed. He might forgive her someday, but she wouldn’t.
She felt a flood of grief and could have cried, but cleared her throat instead: “So, how did you get out of Boscombe Field? Sounds like the place was locked down.”
Patrick could see Danny wasn’t going to tell him anything else about her adventures, so he closed his eyes to summon the history before him.
“Yeah. And now with the Italian dead the Hawkstone guys were really going cuckoo for their Cocoa Puffs, so to speak. Murdo went crazy. Not so much because he lost another man, I think, as because it could just as easily have been him that got hit. So next morning, I can walk a little, and Murdo dresses me up in the Flamingo’s uniform, they all hide next to the windows with their guns, and Murdo tells me to go outside or they’ll shoot me. I can totally see what the idea is, and everybody’s yelling for me not to go out there because they did the same thing with Juan before, and he’s dead. But what do I care, right? I wanted to die at that point.
“So I went outside. If Wulf shot me, they were going to shoot back in the direction the shot came from. I guess he recognized me, because nothing happened. Murdo was so mad he tried to shoot me from the front door, but Wulf shot the doorway up and all the big tough guys ended up on the floor. I went over to the hangar, got the fire truck out, and drove away.”
“It’s not that simple,” Danny said. “The airfield must be swarming with zombies. Everybody’s dead by now. Amy. The rest. You didn’t open the gates full of zeros and shove through and then close the gates behind you. I mean you just didn’t. You’d be dead.”
“Oh, come on, Danielle, give other people a little credit. It’s a truck full of fire-retardant foam. The gate has a big padlock with a key in it. All I had to do was drive over, unlock the padlock, and after a couple of minutes I figured out how to work the foam gun. I sprayed my way out!”
“Just like that?”
“Well, yes. That stuff is awful. The zombies went flying. They couldn’t see or smell or hear or anything; they looked like Christmas decorations. They looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”
“No shit.”
“I drove through the gates, and right away a bunch of the Ladies’ Auxiliary came running from the terminal building and closed the gates behind me. I think like two zombies got through, and Wulf killed them both,” he added, defensively.
Danny shook her head.
“If you don’t believe me,” Patrick protested, “the fire truck is right over there. Ask anybody.”
“So how the hell do you know how to drive a fire truck?”
Patrick blushed. “Oh, so I’m not man enough for that? I can choose the curtains but I can’t operate heavy machinery?”
Sarcasm was obviously lost on Danny. She waved her hand-stump dismissively at Patrick.
“Fire trucks are complex. They’re not cars.”
“It was only a small one. Like a moving truck.”
Danny stared at him, her eyes slitted with suspicion.
“I used to date a fireman,” Patrick confessed.
•
Danny found she could move around now without getting light-headed. She felt good, despite the pain; after years of prescriptions and drinking, she felt as if all the poison had left her body. Maybe it had, running out of the infected stump of her hand. With Patrick’s assistance, Danny took a tour of the junkyard. It was probably originally a place for salvaging parts and selling the rest for scrap metal, but clearly someone had loved the bits and pieces, because there was now a comprehensive auto-building workshop there, full-scale, if hand-built. They had independent generator power, tools, a spray booth, pneumatics—it wasn’t state-of-the-art, but it was everything a fellow needed. The front gates were a masterpiece of folk a
rt. Coyote skulls and deer antlers sprouted from a deadly-looking metal sculpture surmounting a pair of huge iron doors on two-foot hinges. The gate belonged on a medieval castle. The doors were studded with hubcaps and wheels. Each door must have weighed five tons, but they were nicely balanced. Topper gave Danny the tour of the facilities and lamented the previous owner was not among them.
“He was my kind of motherfucker,” Topper intoned, reverently. Then he helped Danny over to a rudely constructed garage, the door to which Ernie swung open on cue.
“Tadaaa,” Ernie said.
“It’s not beautiful,” Patrick said. “But it has a certain something.”
Danny said nothing. She limped past Topper and circled the machine, slowly. She could see the basic outline of the Chevy police special underneath. The paint was the same. But the vehicle had been built up from end to end. A frame of tubular steel, granular and blackened at the welds, mimicked the contours of the car, forming a cage around it. Panels of chain-link fence had been framed in iron and set into the tubular superstructure across all the windows. The doors had their own, independent frames welded straight onto the sheet metal. A row of mismatched off-road lamps were mounted on the roof above the police flashers. At each end of the car the factory bumpers had been pulled off and replaced with railroad ties, bolted on and bound with thick steel rope. Projecting out of the railroad ties was a pair of arms that extended two feet beyond the nose of the vehicle. Between the arms was stretched a length of slender cable.
“That what I think it is?” Danny said at last. She gestured at the cable with her injured hand.
“It’s for cutting cheese,” Topper said. When Danny said nothing else, Topper added, “It’s not done yet. We’d like to reduce the weight some, maybe get some gladiator action going.”
“It’s good,” Danny said, realizing she needed to say something. “Damn good.”
When the following dawn came, Danny had been awake for hours, contemplating the options before her. There was a quotation she remembered from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, good advice even twenty-six hundred years later.
Do not interfere with an army that is returning home. When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.
It was time to create an outlet.
5
The shooting had stopped. Murdo sent several relays of civilians out. The women looked ridiculous in the oversized uniforms, but he even made Mrs. Tits go out holding a gun to Amy the veterinarian’s head, and that didn’t work, either. The sniper was either holding fire, or—more likely—he’d been chased away or eaten by the zeros. It was time to take a chance. Murdo had to decide which of his men was going to take it. But when he brought the subject up, the first thing that happened was Estevez worked the chambering mechanism on his submachine gun and said, “I think it’s your turn, Mr. Man.”
Murdo shouted at them. He raged. They all stood there, bigger and meaner than him. And then he saw it. In a single gesture, assuming he survived, he could make himself into the commander again, the respected leader. He could turn himself into a legend. All he had to do was get out that door and across to the ASV. Once he was inside, he was safe, he was armed to the teeth, and he was back on top.
He told them they were all pussies. Fuck it. Man to do a man’s job. He went to the front door, splintered with bullet holes from Patrick’s escape, and opened it a crack. Nothing. That wasn’t how the sniper operated. He was sure the gunman was up on the ridgeline above the airfield—where else could he be, and not get bitten to death? But it was a mile of rough stone up there. A man could hide out for months in a place like that, picking off targets below; Murdo had spent time in Afghanistan with stone-cold killers who did exactly that for a living.
Murdo knew what to do. Get into the gun turret of the ASV and blast off with the grenade launcher, blow that whole ridgeline to shit. Even if the gunman wasn’t up there, it would sure put the courage back in his boys.
He was hoping somebody would tell him not to go, don’t risk it, let me take your place. Nobody said a thing. Hyperventilating freely, Murdo drew his pistol, then kicked the door open and threw himself outside. He hit the ground painfully and rolled, this way and that, thrusting himself from roll to roll with his legs. But he lost track of the ASV in all the rolling and worked his way too far out into the open. He wasn’t dead yet, so he took a chance and scrambled to his feet and ran, body bent double, to the shelter of the massive vehicle’s flank. He climbed up into the side hatch, gasping for breath, soaked with perspiration. No rifle shots. He made it. That would show those assholes who had what it took.
He reached down into the cockpit and switched on the power, then climbed up into the gunner’s position. He would be exposed again, but he could keep his head down mostly because specific aim wasn’t the issue here. Murdo powered up the weapons systems. There were still a few rounds left. Estevez talked like a big man, and yet he’d used up most of their explosives to blow up one little sports car.
Murdo swung the turret around until the ridgeline crossed his sights, elevated almost as high as the system would go. The rock face towered above. He opened fire, swinging across the side of the mountain. Then a second burst, swinging back, until the grenades ran out. The first salvo hit while the second was still on its way.
The entire mountainside sprouted blossoms of smoke and debris. Then the second salvo of grenades stitched along the rock face below the first impacts, and Murdo was extremely pleased to see the entire damn cliff come apart in long, smoking fissures, then collapse with the slow, rumbling majesty of an iceberg calving into the sea. The roar of so much rock coming down was deafening. The whole world trembled. A solid wall of dust and smoke billowed up and swept toward the airfield, and Murdo bellowed in triumph. He had won.
Then the airborne rain of broken stones came down.
Murdo dove for cover inside the ASV. For twenty seconds the rubble came whistling out of the sky. Glass broke, metal clanged and buckled, and the ground trembled with the hammering of rock. A boulder the size of a king mattress whirled down and cut the firefighting helicopter in half. Dozens of the undead outside the wire were struck down, some reduced to pulp. Then the cloud of dust from the hillside wafted across the rock-strewn asphalt, obscuring everything for twenty seconds.
When the pall lifted, Murdo looked out of the turret to see what he had wrought. The airfield was almost in ruins. There were holes in the roofs, and the tower windows were shattered. Part of the fence at the far end of the runway had collapsed. The front of one of the Humvees was crushed in by a man-sized chunk of rock and there were dents in all the rest of the vehicles, except the ASV, which had weathered the storm of rubble impassively, although it was thickly covered in debris. There were broken windows on the motor home, but it appeared to be intact otherwise. They might have a hard time driving across the parking area, though. There was that much rock thrown around.
Unintended consequences, but who the fuck cared? He was the man. Murdo waved at the terminal building. He saw faces at the broken windows, having a hesitant look outside, afraid.
“Come on, you pussies. Roll out!”
Wulf was happy to see Danny conscious again, but he would have preferred to keep on plugging away until he got all the Hawkstone men. He was pretty sure he could do it. But as usual, the sheriff insisted on moderation. On strategy. After all, the mercenaries might drive the women five miles up the road and leave them behind, not a shot fired or a life lost. So the men from the junkyard waited and watched. The spectacle of the mountain grenade bombing was worth the wait, certainly, although it looked for a while as if it had killed everyone below.
“You still wish you were up there?” Danny asked Wulf.
“If I was up there, he wouldn’t a lived long enough to do it,” Wulf muttered. The problem now was that the fence was compromised. The zeros were gathered primarily at the near end, where the gates were. But there were some at the far end, and they had already discovered the breac
h in the defenses. It would take them some time to make it down the length of the runway, but they were inside the perimeter. And there would be more. However, as they watched—through telescope, binoculars, and rifle scopes—they saw knots of people coming out of the terminal building. The mercenaries were forming rings of civilians in case the gunman was still out there.
“I could make headshots there, easy,” Wulf said, to nobody in particular.
Danny was on the big telescope, but she couldn’t discern who was who. She hoped Amy was down there among those hustling for the vehicles. Less than five minutes later, the convoy was rolling. They saw a bright flag of fire jump out of the 20mm cannon on the ASV, and the swarm of zombies at the gates seemed to glitter and burst into confetti. Something from a parade. They heard the distant rattle of the cannon a few moments later. The undead were falling, cut to pieces. The roadway turned black with guts and blood. Then the ASV jumped forward and rammed the gates open; the convoy rolled through the gap, slowly, the cannon still sweeping the swarm, then picking up speed. The ASV was plowing through the fringes of the crowd now, and then they were all driving away down the road, the motor home in the middle, the remaining Humvee at the back, and behind that stood what was left of Boscombe Field, the undead already stumbling in to claim it for themselves.
Wulf’s toy radio spoke. It stuttered and spat fragments of words. Ernie thumbed his on, as well, and it echoed Wulf’s.
“What band are those on?” Danny asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Ernie said. “Any damn interference cuts ’em out.”
Danny understood. Toy transmitters, like these radios, or remote-controlled cars, were designed to be easily overridden by stronger signals. It was a guarantee that some kid with a foot-long RC dune buggy wouldn’t inadvertently cut out a fire department signal, or a police radio, rendering communications impossible during an emergency. Some devices that were supposed to be safe for use still did it: Certain cordless phones, for example, could break up a transmission as a squad car rolled past the house. As the convoy rolled up the road toward their position, the puny little toy radios were picking up transmissions from the transceivers aboard the vehicles.
