“He said ‘good luck’ and you said ‘9–10.’ What does that mean?” Patrick asked, arms loaded with big rechargeable box flashlights.
“It means, ‘I can handle the situation on my own,’” Danny said.
“Can you?” Patrick asked. It was a sincere question.
Danny palmed her fist. “Let’s find out.”
As Danny’s search teams headed up Wilson Street, Amy led the larger work party into Main Street to start shifting the dead out of the roadway. Amy
knew it was make-work as well as Danny did, but it was better to be doing something. She saw Danny limping away into the darkness, a rumpled outline in the glow of their flashlights. Amy thought she knew the real reason Danny wanted to do a house-to-house search. Not to determine who among her community had died. But to make sure Kelley wasn’t among them.
Just as well
, thought Amy,
that Kelley wasn’t here. At least Danny can hope
.
Dawn was coming. The sky was a shade lighter than the pitch-black world below. Danny and Patrick approached a low-slung bungalow with aluminum siding, one of several in a row: cheaply built weekend cabins that got pressed into service as full-time homes over the years. There was a corpse flopped over the wire fence in front of the house. Danny crouched beside the body and shone her light in its downturned face. One of the corpulent Doone brothers, she couldn’t tell which. They were identical twins. Danny went to the house and tried the door. Unlocked. Called inside. No answer. Danny sprayed a red stroke on the siding by the door, then Patrick followed her inside. The place was so small they had it searched in less than two minutes. Danny handed Patrick the can of spray paint and headed for the next house.
When she looked back, he was still staring at the wall of the first house, his light shining up into his eyes like Bela Lugosi. He hadn’t finished the marking.
“Patrick, are you still with me? Because I actually can’t do this alone.”
“Yeah. I’m just kind of…you know?”
“I feel ya.”
She returned to his side and took the can, shook it. Crossed the first stroke of paint with another one, making an X.
“One more time. This is how they did it in New Orleans. One line means we went inside. Second line means we came out. Date and time in the top quadrant…”
She checked her watch and sprayed in the numbers—
“…Over here, T1 for Team One…”
Patrick held out his hand for the paint.
“I know, and at the bottom, zero for no bodies found.”
Patrick carefully drew a circle at the bottom of the symbol. Danny folded her arms.
“You don’t have to write neat.”
“I can’t help it—I’m an interior designer.”
“This here is the exterior.”
Wulf and Weaver emerged from a house a few doors down on the opposite side of the street. Weaver sprayed a 1 at the bottom of their symbol in green paint. The theory was that when a cleanup crew eventually came to remove the dead, they would mark their information in the last remaining quadrant. Wulf shambled up the road toward Danny.
“Sheriff? Old Gladys Miller’s dead.”
Weaver walked past the corpse hanging over the fence and waved his light at it.
“What about this one?”
“We’ll come back for him later.”
Danny’s ears were ringing, and it wasn’t automobile horns. She hadn’t slept in twenty hours, unless you counted unconsciousness, which contains no rest. She hadn’t slept
well
in a year and a half, to begin with. The back of her head felt like a blacksmith had been working on it. She’d gotten pretty good at ignoring discomfort—if you’re hurting, you’re not dead—but the present situation was something more than an ordinary bad day. It was getting to her, just as it was getting to Patrick. She marched up to the next house in the row, one of the places where Kelley had bunked for a few months when she was a sophomore in high school. Danny peered through the screen door, but it was entirely dark inside.
“Marlon, Frances, you in there? Sheriff Adelman here. Hey, if you’re there, holler…Okay, I’m coming in.”
The door was unlocked and Danny went through. Patrick made the first stroke of paint outside, then followed her. The place was small and low and gloomy, smelling of cigarettes and cats. Patrick shone his light into the kitchen.
“Oh, my God, it’s a nightmare.”
Danny was immediately at his side.
“Did you find them?”
“The décor, I mean. Sorry.”
Danny saw nothing out of the ordinary. “Everybody’s place looks like this.”
Patrick crossed to the television, an old-style box with a digital signal converter on top. There was “Please Stand By” or a test card on every channel that hadn’t gone to static. It seemed there were fewer working signals by the hour. On top of the box was a ghastly porcelain sculpture of kittens holding up a gold-plated basket containing plastic violets.
“Please tell me you don’t live this way.”
“It’s only a place to sleep. I have this kid sister, been kind of raising her since our folks died…I inherited the family house but I got called up for duty, and the place—well, it kind of ran down—she lived here for a while, one time while I was overseas…Her name is…was…”
Danny’s voice cracked and she choked on it and the tears came to her eyes. When Patrick turned around, the indomitable sheriff was sitting on the arm of the sofa, her face in her hands, shoulders hunched as she fought to stop the grief from coming. No luck. It had her. Patrick stepped around the coffee table and rubbed Danny’s bowed back between the shoulder blades, trying to think of some way to comfort her. Nothing suggested itself.
“Did you find her?”
“She ran away a couple days ago. No, wait…Jesus, it was only last night. She was out there somewhere when all this happened.”
“I’m sorry.”
Danny felt Patrick’s hand on her back hesitate. She knew what he was feeling, something strange under her easy-wash shirt. She wanted to shrug off his touch. Her back wasn’t for touching. But she kept herself still. His hands moved up to the smoother surface of her neck and shoulders, and he did what he could to knead some of the tension out.
“When this is all over,” he said, “cross my heart, I will hook you up with a home makeover.”
Danny sniffed back snot and wiped her face with her hands. She tried to smile for him, and almost made it. Then her walkie-talkie spoke, and it was back to business.
Back in town, Amy’s work crew had done better than she’d expected. Going slowly, because the unhappy laborers treated the fallen with reverence, and a couple of True Believers insisted on improvising a sketch of last rites for every body they slung up onto the flatbed truck. But except for some tears and a few individual retreats back to the gym as loved ones were discovered, real work had been accomplished. Maybe Danny was more cunning than Amy credited her for. She was getting the most difficult job done while there were still a lot of hands to help.
Everyone wore a double layer of latex examination gloves. Most of them wore paper dust masks. They had sped up the collection process by commandeering the flatbed truck, which had belonged to Eugene, who knew
the tree business better than anybody. His corpse was among those already lined up on the sidewalk. The jolly tricolor bunting still hung on the sides of the truck, which lent a macabre touch to the proceedings. But with the flatbed they didn’t have to carry every individual corpse the full distance out of the street. As they cleared the corpses from a section of the pavement, a couple of men led by Troy Huppert would move all the cars that still had keys in them. In this way they’d created a crooked but passable traffic lane halfway down the street. Heck, in two years they’d have the road cleared all the way down the mountain.
Partway through the work, Amy radioed Danny on the walkie-talkie with a piece of good news.
“There’s a lady here, name’s Maria, she’s a part-time taxi dispatcher and she knows all about radios. She can work a police set.”
“Get her in there right away,” Danny said. “Right to the communications desk. Have her make a wider search for correspondents. Get some information. Try the military bands as well as the police bands, and make sure to write everything down.” Danny reeled off some frequencies she could remember, Maria said “thank you” into the radio, and then Amy watched as Maria gratefully left the death detail for the relative comfort of the Sheriff’s Station, which had already been cleared. Now, as several of Amy’s party struggled to get an obese woman’s corpse onto the truck, Maria emerged from the station with a scrap of paper held over her head.
“Doctor,” Maria called, and waved Amy over. Everyone there was operating under the misapprehension that Amy was a medical doctor, and Danny had warned her not to suggest otherwise. Amy met Maria halfway across the street. The work party had stopped to listen. Maria touched a finger to her lips and hooked her eyes at the station. Amy beckoned the crew to keep going.
“I’ll be right back. Take five. There’s water in the cab, and change into fresh gloves. We don’t know what this is, yet.”
Inside the station, Maria showed Amy the piece of paper. She had written the bandwidth and the message in square capitals. Amy raised Danny on the walkie-talkie.
“Danny, are you there? Over and out. We got a pretty weird message off what Maria says is the weather band. It’s a recording that repeats every ten seconds.”
Danny’s voice sounded hoarse when she answered:
“You’re supposed to say ‘over,’ then when we’re done talking say ‘out.’ How’s it going? Over.”
“You’ve been crying,” Amy said.
“Allergies,” Danny replied. “What’s the transmission say?”
Amy cleared her throat as if for a recital. But she didn’t read the message aloud.
“Actually, Danny, I think I’d better check this in case Maria misheard it. Hold on. Stay on the line.” Maria was shaking her head in protest, but Amy went into the back room and set the walkie-talkie on the communications desk with the frequency open. Then she turned the radio from headphone to speaker mode and punched the preset button for the weather band. The message was in midrepetition, a computer-generated voice based on keyboard input, like the voice of that physicist in the wheelchair, Stephen Hawking. It was an eerie sound, distant but clear:
“…Will rise again. Repeat: The infected dead will rise again. Repeat: The infected dead will rise again. Repeat: The infected dead will—”
Danny was saying something on the walkie-talkie. Amy picked it up while Maria switched the radio back to headphone mode, nodding her vindication.
“…Some kind of a joke?”
One of the things that Amy found charming about Danny was her extremely rudimentary sense of humor. Danny found the Three Stooges funny, and that was about it. Hitting over the head, caveman stuff. She could hear the funniest thing in the world and just stand there looking suspicious of anybody who laughed. This meant, however, that she sometimes thought things were jokes that a wittier person would recognize could not be. Given what she’d witnessed over the last several hours, Amy was pretty sure this transmission was not a joke. A mistake, maybe, but not a joke.
“It’s a real message on the real weather band,” Amy replied. “But I don’t know what it means. The dead people up here haven’t shown any signs of activity.”
“
Goddammit!
” Danny barked. “Okay, I’m coming down there and figure out what the hell they’re playing at in San Pedro at the weather bureau.”
Maria resumed scanning the radio’s bandwidth.
“Did you lose people?” Amy asked, almost shyly.
“My husband,” Maria said, sighing heavily. “He went crazy and ran away. Not the first time he ran away, but never like
that
before.”
Amy left her there in the station, searching the radio for signs of life.
•
In the Marlon Jackson residence, Danny had splashed some water on her face and mastered the grief. Patrick was standing in the living room, still gazing about him with wonder as the predawn light increased, revealing more and more heinous interior detail. He had an idea for a new decorating show, to be called
How Can You Live This Way?
But he thought it would be extremely tacky to mention it under the present circumstances.
“Feeling any better?” he asked.
Danny was about to reply when a holler came through the front door. It was Wulf.
“Holy fucking
shit
, get out here, Sheriff!”
Danny blew right past Patrick even though he was closest to the door. He followed her outside. It had grown lighter in the quarter-hour since they ventured inside the little house, the sky glowing pale and opaque, drowning the stars. The shadows of night were retreating from the street, curling up under the trees. The world still lacked color but it would come with the sunrise. Wulf was standing nearest to Danny, across the street at the edge of the house lot opposite. Weaver was behind him at the door, halfway through marking the wall: team two, one dead inside. Both men were standing stock-still, eyes fixed on an object down the street. Danny saw it, too, and blinked, and still saw it.
It was one of the Doone twins, standing slack-jawed beside the wire fence. He was a heavy man in life, and now his flesh sagged over his bones, mottled and yellow. He looked around him with filmy eyes, as if trying to remember something. It sure looked like the twin who had been hanging dead over the fence not twenty minutes before.
Danny knew what death looked like. There could be no mistake. Yet the body was no longer on the fence, and this one, if it was the second twin, was dressed exactly the same way as the missing corpse: plaid shirt, brown Dickie work pants. The Doone twins didn’t go in for identical outfits. But this
had
to be the other one. There was no way Danny had mistaken unconscious for dead.
“He was dead, Sheriff. That guy was dead.” It was Weaver, now pointing with the spray can at the figure down the street.
“They’re twins,” Danny said. It
must
be the other one. She walked out onto the street, but didn’t get close. Her instincts were screaming at her that something was very wrong.