by Ben Tripp
The zealots believed the world was supposed to be like this. It was their beloved End Times, and the hand of God was upon the land. They grew strong on their heady brand of magic, writing new chapters to append to the old Bible, full of portents and signs. They had rules, too, but their rules were arcane and punitive and cruel. Danny would find their victims nailed to crosses or burned at the stake. The living flocked to these preachers of death, who seemed to flourish more, the worse things got. Danny might not have resented them if it was not for their insistence that joy and pleasure were abominations, as if God would relent only when the last smile was wiped from the last child’s lips. Most of them didn’t even allow music. The ones who did favored dirges and laments. Danny’s Tribe, now a hundred strong most times, had their own little Woodstock nearly every Friday night, if there weren’t zombies around. Music was all they had left: Art, movies, books—these things were artifacts that required carrying and preserving. Music you could conjure up from nothing, like fire.
The latest of her working hypotheses had yielded two organizing principles toward which Danny moved her Tribe.
The first was a safe place. Safety was a far more transient thing than it appeared. Even the mightiest fortress would fall. So they moved along, and found places that were safe for a while. But the place where the undead couldn’t prosper—that place eluded them. Danny was sure there were tropical islands like that. She imagined Hawaii must be nice, by now. But they were in the American West. So far they’d never made it east of Kansas. The zeros were just too thick. Survivors said the Eastern Seaboard was an unrelieved nightmare.
The second desirable outcome, from Danny’s standpoint, was to find a cure. There were people of science working on it here and there, when they weren’t fleeing for their lives. The virus that caused zombiism was known. It had a number. Some said it was surely a virus engineered to do what it did, a combination of this and that until a perfectly lethal sickness was invented, not only deadly but wicked. It was said that the virus was part mosquito, for the sense of smell, part Hanta Virus for its ability to amplify so rapidly through the host. Other things. Rabies. Eye of newt. It didn’t matter.
So far there was no cure, and no vaccine to immunize the living. Some people were born immune. Others carried the sickness inside them but did not sicken. Some got bitten, sickened, and survived. They were so few.
In the spring Danny’s Tribe picked up the trail of a larger band of people, run with fairness according to homesteaders who encountered them in the occasional fortified settlements they passed. The larger band, calling themselves the Rovers, had their own set of rules, and ran things along military lines. Discipline was tight but it wasn’t arbitrary. They were doing pretty well, folks said. Danny had a theory that groups could get too large for travel. She kept her band capped around one hundred individuals, simply because beyond that she didn’t recognize everybody. It got harder to gauge the merit of individuals. Cliques formed. Little knots of people started coming up with their own plans and rules, which inevitably ran at cross-purposes to the larger group. And it got harder to coordinate self-defense.
Sure enough, as they got closer to the Rovers, who moved more slowly due to sheer mass of numbers, the funeral pyres got taller. The Rovers were decent about it, it seemed to Danny. They burned the undead in one pile and their dead in another; most traveling bands left the undead where they lay, which poisoned the water supply and fouled the air. And the Rovers left behind memorials. It was usually a piece of sheet metal with the names of the dead scribed into it, laid over the ashes and held down with stones.
As Danny’s convoy crept closer to the larger party, day by mile, the pyres of the burned undead got smaller, and the pyres of the newly dead got bigger. Danny had taken to reading the lists of names scratched into the memorials. She didn’t know about zombies in China, but people of every race and creed were still dying. Vehicles full of good supplies were often left behind. Danny found herself drinking more—she’d gotten it under control since the events at Potter, nerves buffered by routine, but the tension was getting to her.
The funeral pyres showed up most often in the derelict towns the Tribe passed through. Towns were deadly. The bigger, the more dangerous. People wandered away from the group. Got greedy and went looting. Found a nest of the undead and got bit. If their numbers were strong enough the silent, undead hunters would surround a foraging party and there would be a battle.
One day they came upon a pyre of the dead around which the undead had been left where they fell, burned in place with hasty splashes of gasoline. Several vehicles had been left behind in what looked like a defensive ring. The list of the dead was written on a piece of cardboard held down with a brick. Danny read the list and wept and nobody knew why. Most of them had never seen her respond with grief to anything.
“Will you find a nail or something and scratch these names onto a piece of metal?” she asked Topper, when he rode up to see what was happening.
He and Ernie took care of the job, and wondered about it. They didn’t spend as much time with Danny these days—she seemed to have her own world around her, and besides, they had women of their own, now. It was a shock to see her grieving.
Two days later they found a service center in the plains, a little cluster of hotel, diner, truck stop, and bus station. The place had been looted long before, but still served as a waypoint; the names of different bands that had traveled that way were painted on the side of the motel. There were zeros strewn around. The remains hadn’t been dealt with at all. Blood on the pavement. The human dead were heaped up and hastily set fire to. The remains, not ashes but roasted flesh, were still warm when the Tribe rolled in. They had their own difficulties with the zeros in that area, and lost a few people. Danny thought the proximity to the larger band put them at risk: the more of the living, the more of the undead. But they traveled on. There was no memorial in that place, and the dead went nameless.
Danny asked Amy to ride with her that day.
“What’s eating you?” Amy asked, as the miles rolled slowly beneath them. And then: “So to speak.”
“Remember Barry Davis?”
“No. Was he the Davises’ kid?”
“Jesus, Amy.”
“Well?”
“Yes he was the Davises’ kid. I mean anybody named Davis is the Davises’ kid. But he was that kid of those Davises. He was going steady with Kelley.”
“I didn’t know that,” Amy said.
She had delivered a baby earlier that week, her first time with a human infant, and the thing was still alive. She only hoped the parents didn’t blame her for how ugly it was. But the parents weren’t exactly supermodels. Still, in the animal world, all babies are born beautiful. With humans it was obviously different.
“He’s dead,” Danny said, obviously expecting Amy would grasp the significance of that. She didn’t. After Amy was silent a while, Danny explained.
“Barry Davis was Kelley’s boyfriend. Her real one, not all the imaginary ones I thought she had. He’s in The Note. They left Forest Peak together the morning everything went to shit.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
They drove in silence for a while.
“Do you like that guy in the old Toyota—the one who makes the guitars?” Danny said.
“He’s okay,” Amy replied.
The silence wore on.
“Remember that place where we found the ashes marked with cardboard?” Danny said, after a while.
“Yeah. You cried.”
Amy saw where Danny was going with the Barry Davis thing, and she didn’t want to get into it. Danny had put her Kelley period behind her, although she still kept the filthy, tattered note in a plastic bag next to her heart. She was looking to the future again, even if she had no personal plans. The Tribe gave her something to do, something to perpetuate. If Danny got thinking about the past, she was going to end up crazy and alone again.
“The thing is,” Danny said
, “there was a Barry Davis on that list back there.”
“It’s not an unusual name,” Amy protested. “If he was like Barry Hashimoto maybe. Or Mogambo Davis.”
“Still.”
It would explain why Danny was allowing the convoy to get closer to the Rovers, rather than falling back, as was her custom. She had found out the hard way that traveling bands of men don’t mingle well. They’re glad to meet, but once the drink flows, they’re quick to fight. They mix up whose mate is whose. They have trouble coordinating night watches, and someone gets carried off in the night and their bones are never found. But now she was pushing to catch up, if anything. Danny had been urging them to pack their gear and get rolling much earlier than usual, and she rode herd longer into the afternoons.
She and Amy passed the rest of the day’s travel quietly, as old friends will. Both of them were thoughtful.
The next day, they saw smoke.
3
They were somewhere in the Dakotas. The winter was coming: Danny thought they should probably head south before too long. Traveling was slower than ever, what with bridge collapses and little trees growing right in the middle of the interstates. If it got cold too soon—and the weather was wholly unpredictable now—they’d be stuck in some place living like Eskimos until spring.
She had been pushing to get close to the Rovers. She wanted to have a talk with their leaders, although perhaps as a solo envoy of her people, to save mixing with the larger band. They were obviously in disarray and she didn’t know how desperate they were. They might decide her orderly baggage train was just what they needed to put themselves right.
Whatever plans she had made to that effect went out the armored window of her cruiser when she saw the smoke. It was a fire out in the prairie, the black smoke rising up against a gray, featureless sky that left the world without shadows. Her first instinct was to accelerate and catch up with the action, but she had people to take care of. She called a halt by the roadside. Recon was called for. Although this duty generally fell to the bikers, this time she wanted to join in. Topper and a big, scar-faced man called Pike elected to come along. Topper had lost a lot of weight. There were no more heavy people in this world. He looked pretty good, for an ugly bastard. Pike, on the other hand, made ugly an art form. As always when she rode out, Danny put Amy in charge. You never knew.
“What’s happening?”
It was Patrick, come up from the middle of the column. He had weathered into his broken face, and he was tough as brass. He had a boyfriend, a guy from Philly who had walked and fought a thousand miles before he ran into the convoy. People called him “Beowulf,” because his story sounded like something from Norse mythology. He’d killed hundreds of zombies, entirely with hand weapons. Patrick had become very centered with him, more emotionally self-sufficient.
Danny shook her head. “Old business.”
“You still think—”
“Who knows,” Danny said. But her eyes were on the horizon. She thought she knew.
“Remember we’re here,” Patrick said. “You’re not alone.”
They drove down the interstate at refreshing speed, not having to keep slow for the White Whale and the overloaded campers that made up the heart of the convoy. Danny kept her windows down and felt the freezing air blowing around her. It was that kind of weather: warm enough until the air started moving. Old thoughts Danny had buried in shallow graves were coming up. She banished their ghosts. Just go and see. Just go and see.
It was a city, not just a town. One of those places that sprang up around a missile installation in the far end of nowhere, all built at the same time, with an Army base and a high school and somewhere to buy groceries. Then it grew and some kind of industry came along and the place thrived for a while, same as all such towns, with good suburbs and low-rent neighborhoods, competing schools, white frame churches that stuck up like stalagmites. Then the downturn came and the place shriveled until it was half-empty at best. Then the dead rose up, and now the city was empty altogether.
They stopped at the only high place around, an overpass on the interstate where a local farm road passed beneath. Pike’s motorcycle was a “rat bike,” a monstrous, rusting piece of ironwork with scythe blades on the wheel hubs and ape-hanger handlebars, a scrap-metal beast. Topper rode a stock ’75 Harley boattail he’d liberated from an abandoned garage. They swapped a pair of binoculars back and forth.
Nothing moved but the flames, so they followed the smoke. The heart of the city was on fire. On the outskirts of town they found burning vehicles and signs of recent combat. Brass cartridges and incongruously colorful plastic shotgun casings were strewn around street corners where pitched battles had been waged. Vivid gore stood out in contrast to the drab masonry and faded tar. There were trails of blood, as if the pavement had been swabbed with blood-soaked mops. The bloody stains led toward the inner city, not away from it.
Danny called off the search after only a few blocks. Whatever had happened here, it was only hours past. It looked like two competing nomadic groups had clashed; the tells of the fighting did not bear any resemblance to the pattern of zero assaults. This had been a two-sided confrontation lasting at least several minutes—the conflict had clearly been pressed from street to street. The undead didn’t fight, they attacked. Lightly armed, Danny and her two companions were not going to profit from a chance encounter with either of the competing sides.
As they made their way out of the city, they saw zombie blood. It was spattered on the ground and on the walls of desolate buildings. The fallen undead had been dragged away, as well. With that, Danny was familiar: It was the mark of the Rovers. Why, then, were those bodies dragged in the opposite direction from the red-blooded corpses of the recently alive? She and her companions followed the drag marks to where the black blood formed pools, after which the signs ended. The zombie remains had probably been loaded into a vehicle. Now that she had her back to the fire in the city, Danny could see a blurred finger of smoke rising from a suburb to the east. She consulted with Topper and Pike on whether they should pursue the matter, and the men said yes, because they could hear the urgency in Danny’s voice.
“Got nowhere else to be,” Topper said.
They came to a broad, concrete plaza overlooked by a jolly sheet-metal clown: It was the entrance to a small amusement park. The plaza was surrounded by acres of parking. It was hard to imagine the place doing much business even in the best of times, but during the summer it might have been something to do with a boring Saturday. The parking lot was forested with lighting standards on which various comic characters were mounted: The lion was 3A, the monkey in a hat was 5G, and so forth. Beyond the entrance gates were ticket booths and turnstiles, and beyond those, a mock-cowboy town with Victorian shop fronts, a saloon, and a carousel. Beyond the imitation town were thrill rides as still and faded as dried flowers, and at the far end of the park a couple of skeletal roller coasters hunched their spines. Opposite the amusement park was a shopping center. On the unobstructed sides, there were views to the south that took in miles of featureless grassland, and to the north was the city.
The pyre of corpses had been hastily arranged in the center of the plaza directly in front of the gate of the amusement park, where ornamental shrubbery had once spelled the name of the place, but was long dead and now illegible.
When Danny, Topper, and Pike rode up to the crackling heap of corpses, they saw a Volkswagen microbus parked not far from the blaze. The windows of the bus were reinforced with barbed wire stapled to bolted-on wooden uprights. There was a woman sitting in the open side door, her head hanging. She held a pistol in her hand, loosely, drooping toward the ground, the way in an easier time she might have held a telephone handset after receiving bad news. When the woman heard the motors approaching, she turned her head to listen; at length, she looked up.
Danny climbed out of the cruiser. The men stayed back. There was electricity in the air. Pike had it in mind to ask what was up, but thought better
of it when Topper gave a single, curt shake of his head. This might be a good time for a moment of silence.
There are no coincidences, Harlan had once told Danny; it’s only the odds coming due. Danny walked toward the woman in the bus, and felt as if her legs had turned to new-fallen snow. They didn’t feel substantial enough to hold her off the ground, but they kept moving, and she kept getting closer, and then they met.
“I got your note,” Danny said.
The men left them and went back to the convoy to deliver the news: the sheriff would be away for a few days. She was fine, she was dandy, in fact. But she had some family business to take care of. Sure, she’d catch up. Meanwhile, the doctor was in charge. Most folks didn’t know the significance of this intelligence. Amy wanted to go to them right away, but Topper insisted. Danny had been very clear on the point. There was something new in that city. It was a trap. Something so dangerous they weren’t going anywhere near. The sheriff would catch up with them. When had she failed to come back?
Danny got Kelley into the cruiser with difficulty. She had great facility living with one functional hand now, and the builders in the Tribe had an informal competition going for who could invent the most useful replacement for her severed fingers. Normally she wore an ordinary glove. But lugging a person who couldn’t support her own weight, that took two hands. With Kelley arranged in the front seat, Danny got out of that cursed city. She headed south, because that’s where the nearest road went.
“I got bit,” Kelley said. It was the first time she’d spoken.
“Yeah, I see,” Danny said. “I’m sorry.” She meant far more than sorry about the bite.
Kelley nodded. She was tired. “Not your fault,” she said, and meant far more, too.
