“You,”
she croaked.
Danny woke up.
It had been only a few minutes since she dozed off in Mr. Carter’s easy chair. Not refreshing, but it would help. She put the note back in her pocket. As she headed up the front hall, Danny continued summarizing what she understood. Had millions really died? And a few hours later, they got up again? Some hadn’t gotten back up. But even the ones that rose again were cold to the touch, and didn’t have heartbeats. They were not alive, but did that mean they were truly dead? This was where Danny’s hypothesis fell apart. A tree didn’t have a heartbeat, either, and it probably didn’t feel if bugs were eating its leaves. But a tree was alive.
So why aren’t these things alive?
she thought.
Why am I so sure? Does it matter?
She went outside, her head throbbing, and almost walked into one of the things. It was standing at the foot of Mr. Carter’s front stoop, looking up at Danny with those empty eyes and the mouth hanging open. It was a soft-faced boy, fourteen or fifteen, wearing a Dodgers T-shirt. His skin was pale as candle wax except for lips that were almost black, and the inside of his mouth was gray. Danny recoiled. The boy had no reaction. She wondered if it could respond to anything, maybe simple commands.
“Shoo,” Danny said, and whisked her hands at him. The boy’s eyes fixed on her hands. He stared at them even when she dropped them to her sides. Stupid, but more than stupid. He knew nothing. The boy was a robot made out of meat. Danny swung herself over the stoop railing and went around the dead teenager.
She needed a plan.
Some of the more intrepid survivors had begun unfolding a plan of their own while Danny was inside Mr. Carter’s house. They were herding the infected (as Danny now thought of them) together. It could have been sheep or pigs they were gathering: Some of the survivors stood with their arms outstretched in a pose Danny associated with basketball defense, keeping themselves in front of the nearest infected and shucking side-to-side. With their gloves and masks they looked like Japanese traffic cops. Others would enter this ring of arms, towing one of the infected along behind them. They would leave it, and go off to find another. It was a human corral. Danny had to admire the expeditious spirit that drove them to do it—survivors keep themselves busy as a way to stave off shock and despair—but she wasn’t
sure if they knew what to do once the herd had swelled beyond their ability to keep its members in. There were at least forty or fifty in there now. Maybe half the infected population of Main Street. Danny was also concerned about the potential for transmission of the disease. If it
was
a disease, had it burned itself out? She didn’t think so. If those things could walk, she had a feeling the infectious agent was still at work. Maybe they shouldn’t be getting close. She still didn’t know.
Danny watched for a minute. Sometimes one of the living would recognize a friend or relative and start crying or babbling, trying to tell the others
this
one was different, but in general it was a good effort. Then one of the men who seemed to be in charge of fetching the infected came near her, to collect the Dodgers boy in front of Mr. Carter’s stoop.
“Where do you plan to put them?” Danny said.
“There’s a fellow there named Troy who says we can run them through the Quik-Mart and out the back into the alley. It’s like a ready-made jailyard.”
“Is Troy around?”
Danny found the fireman in the alley behind the downhill side of Main Street. He was overseeing the construction of barricades at each end of the six-car parking lot behind the Quik-Mart. His team consisted of several survivors, including the boy and the blue-haired girl she’d seen in the gym. They’d been eating candy with Weaver and Patrick, Danny remembered. Now they were using convenience-food display racks to fill the gaps between cars parked side to side in the alley, forming a fence. If the risen dead stayed as numb-nutted as they were now, she thought, this primitive containment would probably do the trick.
The next question was how many of these things would they have to deal with? There were fifty at the beginning, and in the last hour that number had doubled. There could be several thousand of them within a few miles. So far, the survivors were behaving with admirable calm. It was mostly shock, Danny knew from experience, and when it wore off they were all going to be useless basket cases. Then she would have to deal with hysterics, fights, looting, and God only knew what. And if the walking corpses started to decay…
For the first time, it occurred to Danny that the living would probably have to get out of Forest Peak. All the years she kept crawling back, swearing they’d get out of there, her and Kelley—this wasn’t how she’d envisioned it happening.
Troy met Danny a few yards down the alley. “I had to get people doing something,” he explained, sounding apologetic. “There was some woman all up in Amy Cutter’s face because she wouldn’t try to revive her husband. Now he was already revived, right? I mean he was walking around. But she wanted a heartbeat to go with the walk. And Cutter didn’t know what to tell her. So I got in there and broke it up and followed your advice: Keep ’em busy. They seem to like having something to do. But I don’t have any idea what we do after we got the victims locked down.”
“Victims?”
“The dead people. I don’t know what to call them. Wolfman said they were—”
He made a face. Didn’t want to say it. Danny almost whispered: “Zombies, I know.”
“Well it don’t seem right.”
“I been thinking of them as ‘infected,’ but that’s not much better. Here’s the thing, though. There’s a shitload more of them out there. I mean a hundred to one. I’m not sure we can hold our position in town. There doesn’t seem to be any danger, but what if it’s still contagious? What if they start to…you know, to rot? We may need to go somewhere further up the line. Forest Peak got hit pretty hard, but the wave stopped here, I think. Up the line in Big Bear or Alpine Glen, it could be a lot better.”
Troy watched the survivors examining their corral-making handiwork around the parking lot. Almost time for the roundup. Herd those dead suckers into the pen. He looked back at Danny, nodding.
“You said ‘the wave stopped here.’ That’s what it was, a wave. Meaning we’re at the high tide line.”
“Meanwhile,” Danny resumed, “get your people back to the gymnasium. See if Amy can get that woman to allow her to examine the dead husband. I’d like to know what we’re dealing with, if there’s anything she can figure out. Amy can do that.”
As Danny walked toward the back of the Sheriff’s Station to check on Maria, another piece fell into place in her working hypothesis. If Forest Peak represented the end of a theoretical Los Angeles outbreak zone, and assuming downtown L.A. was the epicenter of the disease, that meant you could probably draw a big, ragged circle around the city—beyond which there would be a vast uninfected zone, until the perimeter of the next epicenter. She needed to look at the map on the wall in the station.
Danny was sick of making half-plans that went nowhere. But there
didn’t seem to be much else she could do. She couldn’t get out in front of this situation. She raised Amy on her radio.
“Have you begun the examination? Over.”
“No, out. I mean over.”
“Is the victim’s wife cooperating?”
“That’s a big negatory, sir.”
“Keep trying. Or grab another one of the infected. I want to know what we’re dealing with, over.”
“Rooty-toot,” Amy said, and the radio went silent.
Inside the Sheriff’s Station, Maria was still at the communications desk. She had a couple of candy bar wrappers and a Diet Coke at her elbow. Danny felt a pang of guilt: She wasn’t attending to her people’s needs any better than she was attending to herself. Maria should have some real food, if they could find any. “How are you doing?” Danny asked.
“Okay,” Maria said. But she didn’t sound like she meant it. “You haven’t seen a man with a mustache and a Coors T-shirt? He was wearing a denim jacket. And low-heel cowboy boots. Light brown ones, I think. Maybe your height.”
Danny smiled. “No, but you would make a good cop. Good powers of observation and recall.”
Maria smiled back, but her eyes were blurred by tears. She hitched a sigh and tapped the radio set with a pencil. “No news anywhere. The internet isn’t showing anything new. There’s still six police places on the radio that I know about. There were nine before, but now there are six. None of them know squat.” She put her hand primly over her mouth, as if squat was a rude word. Her accent suggested Spanish was her first language, so she might not be sure if it was.
“But they said everybody got up again, like here,” Maria went on. “All the living people brought their dead relatives to the hospitals and the police stations and fire stations and now there are these huge crowds of those…those
muertas vivas
all filling up the places. One of the policemen asked if we could come down and help them. I said I would ask you.”
Danny snorted. First responders swamped by walking corpses. She wished Forest Peak had a hospital, right about now. Danny took a look at Maria’s block-print notes on the remaining radio conversations. “What’s this one?”
“The weather station went off the air twenty minutes ago.”
“Any new messages from there?”
“The same thing over and over about the infected dead rising again, until it shut off.”
“And nothing from any of the military bands?” Danny already knew the answer would be
no
. Aside from the general military proscription against loose radio talk, these days all branches were using digital satellite transmissions for most communication, not radio. Digital you couldn’t listen in on. And Danny didn’t even know how many units were in-country. They routinely lied about troop levels in every theater of war. The real number of personnel on American soil was far lower than most people imagined. They were probably all crammed in C-5B Galaxy cargo planes on the way to clear the streets of Washington, D.C. So the leadership wouldn’t be troubled by unsightly dead people.
Danny placed her hand on Maria’s shoulder and suggested she take a break. Maria shook her head. What was she going to do, go for a walk? Danny could understand that. “Lemme know if you hear anything new.”
Amy examined the dead man while Weaver and Troy held him down.
The man struggled feebly like a turtle flipped over on its back. He was stretched out on one of the folding tables in the gym, the only one of the infected they’d brought inside. They had kept him in the anteroom at one end of the building, not wanting to risk spreading whatever it was into the area where people were sleeping and eating, although it might have been just as much a desire to keep somewhere in town death-free as any medical consideration. The gym had become a sort of sacred space for the living. Patrick stood a few feet away, next to the dead man’s wife by the door. She had never given anyone her name, but called the walking corpse Larry, and she insisted someone figure out what was wrong with him. As Amy had decided to perform an examination on one of the dead, he would do as well as any other. He did not recognize his wife.
Amy’s veterinary tools were mostly identical to the instruments used on humans. She’d brought a selection from the van, which was now parked by the gymnasium. All of her furry friends had escaped during the morning. She hoped Diggler was all right. He was some pig. Amy’s instruments were in a scalpel roll, not her veterinary bag, because the bag had her business name in gilt letters on the side, and she didn’t think Mrs. Larry would respond well to a veterinarian examining her husband—even if he was dead. Some people were so sensitive. Among other instruments there was the
penlight for eyes, an otoscope for ears, a stethoscope, and an ultrasonic Doppler veterinary sphygmomanometer, which didn’t look anything like the human version with the inflatable cuff, but measured blood pressure just as well. She listened to Larry’s cold, spongy chest. There was plenty of sloshing around in there, but no heartbeat. And no pulse at the wrists or neck. Patrick wrote down her observations on the blank pages of a math class notebook he’d found under the bleachers.
“I’m not getting any pulse at the neck, either,” Amy said. “So no circulation, no dilation of pupils, and body temperature has remained around eighty degrees for the last twenty minutes. The, uh…remains…or the ill person, anyway,” Amy corrected herself as Mrs. Larry gave her a sharp look, “is fairly active, so that may be why the temperature has stayed constant. Muscular activity produces heat. Okay.”
The infected thing opened his mouth and a faint hiss came from the throat. Amy made an involuntary noise of disgust. “Moving right along. There seems to be some respiration, but it’s not involuntary or whatever. Autonomic I mean.”
Larry’s distraught wife broke in:
“How can you not know the right words? You’re a doctor.”
“Doctors are notoriously forgetful,” Amy explained. “Anyway, we were thinking of changing the terms around. Autonomic sounds so cold, doesn’t it?” She returned to her examination. “I’d like to take a liver core temperature but the spouse of the party probably won’t go for that…” Amy looked at Mrs. Larry, who shook her head. She’d seen enough episodes of
CSI
to know that’s what you did to dead people, and her Larry was not dead.
“So,” Amy went on, “I guess then let’s do a little prick test.”
“That’s disgusting!” the nerve-wracked wife started to object.
“She means prick test with a needle,” Patrick offered.
“Don’t you hurt him,” the woman said, and covered her eyes. Amy used an ordinary sewing pin of the type used to keep the holiday bunting together.
She poked the dead man’s fingers, gave a jab to the corpse’s ankle, and tried the side of his face. No flinching at all. “No reaction to pinpricks. No sensation. Like a diabetic or something.”
The examination continued for another fifteen minutes. By the end of it, Weaver and Troy were sweating from the effort of holding the body down. There was no apparent strength in its limbs, but the arms and legs had a
way of twisting around in the grip, the skin loose over the muscles, that made it extremely difficult to hang on.