“Are you Mikey or Geoff?” she asked. The Doone twin turned to look at her, his motions halting. Like a paralytic drunk, Danny thought.
Like Wulf yesterday morning
. “You been drinking?”
But the fat, jaundiced thing in front of her didn’t respond. It didn’t understand. Maybe he was in shock, or maybe he’d been in a coma and he wasn’t all the way out of it. Danny knew people down at Walter Reed Hospital, buddies of hers like Harlan, who were going to spend the rest of their lives in that condition. If they were still alive. Danny realized Patrick was almost pressed up behind her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Don’t go any closer. I’m totally creeped out.”
Weaver came up the yard and crossed the street to Patrick. Wulf approached the Doone twin warily, as if evaluating a potentially rabid animal. “This cocksucker was deader’n disco, Adelman. I swear it.”
“He’s not dead now.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Wulf got to within fifteen feet and waved his hands in front of the swaying fat man. The eyes, cloudy like poached eggs, followed the motion with difficulty. Danny was unaware that her hand had slipped to her sidearm and unsnapped the holster flap. She wasn’t going to make the town derelict deal with this. So she stepped right up to whichever Doone it was. He turned to face her like a drunk in a game of blind man’s bluff. There was a small fly walking across his cheek.
“Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?” Danny asked. The twin’s tongue was rolling around in his mouth like a big, meaty grub, but there was no attempt to form words.
Weaver took his arm from around Patrick’s shoulders and stepped closer for a better look: “If he’s not dead, Sheriff, he’s pretty damn ill.”
Wulf backed away, making a noise of exasperation. Of
course
the thing was dead. Danny wasn’t listening. She was staring at the round Doone face, getting close enough to smell the urine that stained the brown work pants.
“Look at his eye,” she said.
The small fly had wandered up the cheek and over the pouchy lower eyelid. Now it was walking across the man’s eyeball. It stopped on the dome of the cornea to clean its forelegs. The eye never blinked.
The one certainty in the universe for Danny was death. It was absolute. There was no breaking the rules. Until now. Time for a new working hypothesis.
Something flashed into Danny’s field of view and there was a solid
clang
and the Doone twin dropped to the road, brown fluid spilling out of his nostrils. The fly skidded away through the air. Wulf was standing behind the corpse with a shovel in his hands. There was hair on the blade. Danny leaped back. Before her boots hit the ground, the gun was in her hand.
“Jumping Jesus Christ! What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” she yelled.
Weaver ran up to Wulf and pulled the shovel out of his gnarled fists. “You killed him,” he said.
Wulf shook his head, unrepentant. “He was already dead.”
Danny holstered her piece and knelt beside the body. It was as dead as before. But now unquestionably: a deep cleft was chopped into the back of the skull right through the bald spot. The edges of the bone showed like teeth under the ruptured skin. Weaver whistled low and long. “He was dead, but he got up again.”
Wulf took this as an opening to present his ironclad defense: “Anybody born after 1940 knows when a zombie shows up, you gotta smash its head. Destroy the brain.”
“Don’t call him a zombie,” Danny said. “That’s bullshit.”
Wulf spat on the ground. “There’s living and dying. You can’t have both.”
Wulf was in a staring contest with the angry sheriff. The old man snarled, “We gotta destroy the brain.”
Danny realized what could be happening, right now, while they argued: “We gotta get back to town.”
The living wept on Main Street.
Danny and her search teams arrived at the base of Wilson Street. There were a dozen of the risen here, wandering among the cars, faces vacant. They were absolutely silent. The survivors who made up Amy’s work crew had gotten back against the walls of the buildings, keeping well clear of the now-animated corpses. But they didn’t run away from them, either. It
seemed like there was some kind of possibility, some kind of hope. Maybe they hadn’t been dead, after all.
The sky was bright now, dawn only minutes away, and despite the fresh horrors below them, the songbirds were enjoying their morning shouting contest. For a long minute Danny, Patrick, Weaver, and Wulf stood where they were at the intersection of Wilson and Main, watching the once-neat rows of corpses along the sidewalk stir and twist, begin to rise. Not all of them showed signs of animation. Maybe half or two-thirds, Danny thought. The rest behaved like proper dead bodies, lying still.
Nobody knew what to say until Wulf found the words.
“This situation,” he announced, “is shittier than an asshole sandwich.”
One of the ambulatory corpses had spotted the quartet and was now staring at them, mouth drooping. After an interval, it took a few uncertain steps in their direction. Wulf pulled down the spear-tipped flagpole from the front of the notary’s office and held it out before him, ready to thrust. Danny stomped the shaft with her boot, snapping it in half.
“Forget the brain,” she said.
Wulf muttered obscenities and backed away. Amy was down the street from the station, giving the walking dead as wide a berth as possible. Several of them followed, swaying in her wake.
Danny kept close to the buildings as she made her way to the nearest civilians, a group sheltering on the steps of the barber shop. It was the place nearest to the flatbed truck, upon which a couple of the things were struggling to their feet, tangled in overturned folding chairs. One of them wore the uniform of a highway patrolman. It was Jordan Park, dead like the rest.
Hours before, Danny had been sitting on one of those folding chairs, eating chili and nursing a hangover, thinking things couldn’t get much worse. Danny thought she should probably take the radio and sidearm off Park’s corpse—she didn’t like the idea of the thing having a weapon on it, and the radio might be useful.
She noticed that several of the reanimated dead were attracted to the motion of her moving down the street. They shuffled toward her.
Danny was trying to decide between hope and horror. To lose someone to death was to come up against a great, hateful mystery, a thing that would claim everyone some day. To see that person return from death, if only halfway—was that some kind of mercy, or was it the worst possible outcome?
Several of the things were coming down the Wilson Street grade. Earlier, on the way down the hill, Danny’s search teams had seen some of them
standing inside the windows of paint-marked houses, heads turning slowly to follow the living as they passed by. Maybe these were the same ones, following her.
Danny felt dizzy. Her eyes burned when she blinked. Was this the onset of the poison or contagion or whatever it was? And then she realized what she was feeling was probably something simpler: exhaustion. It had been twenty-four hours since the alarm clock beat her to the punch.
She glanced at Amy as she arrived. Amy’s forehead was wrinkled in the middle with the concerned look that usually meant Danny was falling apart and didn’t know it.
“I’m going to have a look inside a couple of places here and see if anybody’s alive and hiding,” Danny said.
“Just don’t kill yourself,” Amy said. “I need you around.” She hurried away to talk with a couple of men who were escorting a sobbing woman down the street. Danny opened the unlocked door of Mr. Carter’s house. It was as much for something to do as because she wanted to see if anybody was alive inside. Maybe she could find some Excedrin. Painkiller and caffeine all in one convenient pill. Mr. Carter had been Danny’s science teacher, and maybe Kelley’s, too, if she remembered correctly. “Mr. Carter?” she called down the front hallway. No response.
Danny considered the situation of the dead things walking around outside. They had the limbs and faces and hair of human beings, wore the clothing in which human beings had dressed them the previous day, but there was something fundamental missing, the absence of which marked them as not-human. Danny felt a need to identify what that was. It seemed important. If she knew what was wrong, maybe she would know what to do about it—or at least how to feel. Maybe she was overthinking it. They were dead. She was sure of that much. Her mind wasn’t set up to analyze the semantics of mortality. The actual words she thought were:
The lights are on, but nobody’s home
. But she was thinking in shorthand, and understood there were bigger questions underpinning the ones she was framing for herself.
Danny looked out the front window and watched one of them, a child no more than five years old, as it shuffled down the street, its head swiveling slowly from side to side like an oscillating fan. Hell, that kid barely even got started. Danny wondered if there were babies lying around, undead like this, lying there staring at the sky. She wanted to shake off the questions that swarmed in her mind, but they wouldn’t go away. She needed to approach
the thing systematically or she was going to end up like the other survivors she could see along the edge of the street, locked in a useless staring contest with the walking dead.
Danny moved out of the living room past the stairs to the kitchen, and saw nothing except a relentlessly ordinary house. There was a newspaper open on the footstool in front of Mr. Carter’s favorite chair. A half-cup of coffee standing beside the kitchen stove. No sign of a world-changing crisis, not even in the paper. Maybe his shambling remains were wandering around on one of the other floors. She could search upstairs, look in the basement. But there was no point. He was dead, regardless of whether he could move.
The power was still working, and there was a notebook computer open on the dining room table. Danny checked the internet. It looked normal. There was the search page. She could tap in a news query.
Danny treated computers like telephones. They were conveniences for staying in touch with Kelley during deployments, more than anything. The internet was for headlines, and navigating the VA health care bureaucracy. She didn’t know how to dig much deeper than major news outlets and a couple of social media sites. Danny’s area of expertise was rooted in the analog world: guns, vehicles, and tactics.
dead rising again
, she typed.
Answers came back, and Danny’s heart leaped. But then she saw it was all monster movies and Christian websites. Not news. She navigated over to the Fox News page. It was down for repairs. CNN had stories a day old on it. Danny clicked through a couple of them: They described the early stages of the panic overseas, with fears it could reach the United States, but there wasn’t anything recent. There seemed to be some early consensus that it was a disease, a biological agent. Maybe a virulent flu. But it was all speculation, leading nowhere.
She spent a few frantic minutes clicking around a variety of sites, and it was the same thing everywhere, as if the entire internet had turned its attention to the strange malady spreading through the world, then abruptly ceased to be updated at some point during the previous day. Which, she reflected, was probably the case, if the death toll was the same everywhere. It seemed strange, though. Surely there were shut-ins and people hiding in their bedrooms who had survived this long. They ought to be twatting or chirping or whatever they called it, sending out bulletins. Maybe there were, and she didn’t know how to find them.
Or maybe they froze those government servers
, she thought. After all, nearly everything on the internet passed through federally operated American hubs. Maybe they just flipped a switch and suspended the entire system in time. But that kind of paranoid thinking wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Instead of informing her, the internet was making Danny crazier, panicky. She folded the computer shut.
In the back of her mind, the part that analyzed the available data and built plans upon it, Danny was organizing the chaos of questions into some kind of usable form. She knew that some deadly agent had killed millions of people. It was transmitted somehow—an aerosol dropped from aircraft, or a gas, or terrorists running around with Hudson sprayers.
She had to choose a starting point. Danny’s working hypothesis required it. So she decided to assume the agent was a disease. It made enough sense to get on with. The resulting wave of death had traveled rapidly because the victims, once infected, would run as fast and as far as they could, until they fell down dead. She didn’t know if the disease killed them or if they simply ran until their hearts gave out. But many of the people they came in contact with also became infected. Then those people ran. The thing didn’t stop spreading until there were no more people to infect. It was like a fatal relay race. Danny was either immune or hadn’t come into close enough range to get sick. She thought of her deputies, how she had ordered them to remain in an exposed position. But at the time, exposure wasn’t a part of the equation. Maybe it still wasn’t. Regrettably, she didn’t know dick.
She went halfway down Mr. Carter’s basement stairs and called for him again. No response. If he was down there, back from the dead, let him stay there. If the Army or someone could spare a few units to clear the town, so be it, they could take Mr. Carter away.
Danny returned to the living room and sat on the couch, but her back was to the door. So she moved to the easy chair. But it commanded the view out onto the street, and she could see the infected wandering around. She needed something else to look at. She took Kelley’s note out of her breast pocket and turned the tightly folded pages in her hands. She was afraid to read it, but wondered what it contained. She wondered if Kelley was alive. She imagined a conversation she could have with Kelley, explaining how she didn’t have any choice, how she was sorry to be such a hard-ass but that was what life had handed them both. But Kelley wouldn’t stop talking back. She wasn’t listening. Danny wanted to shake her or something, get the damn kid’s attention.
Don’t turn your back on me
. But then
Kelley twisted around, one hand extended, a rat-eaten finger pointing at Danny: She was dead, her jaw hanging loose, eyes like blisters.