“Ah, Jesus, Amy. What are you talking about?”
“Diggler. He’s a pig, right? Kelley’s like ten times smarter than him.”
“How is Diggler still alive?”
The smile melted off Amy’s face and went all the way around the clock to misery.
“How can you say that?”
“Are we really having this conversation? Seriously, how do you know the pig’s alive.”
“He just is.”
“That’s irrational.”
“So is driving in this direction. You can’t fool me, Danny. I know what’s up. You want to catch Kelley.”
Danny made a noise of contempt and looked out the side window. “Don’t be stupid. Less danger this way. Simple as that.” Amy was nuts. Completely crazy.
Crazy like a fox.
Danny was silent after that, until the convoy pulled into Scobie Tree.
The town of Scobie Tree had dried up and blown away in 1958, when the military traffic along the roads into the desert settled down from the Cold War high. The place was never impressive: It had been a stagecoach stop 150 years earlier, then a silver mine opened up and kept a few hundred souls occupied for thirty or forty years until the automobile came along. A handful of folks stuck around to pump gas and change tires after the silver ran out; they made it as far as the Second World War, and prospered again briefly, then drifted away.
Now Scobie Tree consisted of a bunch of outbuildings (they always seemed to outlast the structures they were built to serve), an old brick hotel (then rooming house, and finally a good place to store whatever was scavenged from the abandoned buildings around it), a gas station, and a general store. There was a plaque bolted up on the gas station wall. A couple of scenes from the Robert Mitchum movie
Out of the Past
had been filmed there, according to the plaque.
Scobie Tree had one important thing going for it. About a mile outside the three-building town, there was a freeway interchange: The tail end of Route 114 met the 12A, and the 12A could take you to other, bigger roads anywhere you wanted to go—west to the high desert communities, northwest all the way to San Francisco, northeast past the Mojave to Las Vegas, or due east to Arizona.
It was a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. An ideal place to keep away from the living dead and still have some traveling options.
Danny was sure Kelley would have gone this way, because Kelley had privileged knowledge gleaned from her cop sister: There wasn’t a dedicated police force anywhere in the area. She could run that shiny red Mustang at 120 miles per hour and not see a cop all day, unless it was a highway patrolman—and Danny had a police radio in the Mustang’s glove box. Kelley would have known well ahead of time if there was a rogue Smokey in the desert.
Danny was sure she was on the trail of her wayward sister. And although
she hadn’t scraped up the courage to read the note, Amy had, and Amy didn’t say anything to contradict Danny’s thesis. Danny would read the note while they were stopped in Scobie Tree. She hoped she could handle it.
Danny got on the radio and explained how they would approach settled areas from here onward. She was going to take a tour of the town in the interceptor, and if she spotted any survivors or undead she would note their position and a party could go out and take the appropriate action.
Just outside town, Danny made Amy pull over and she hauled her boots on and got behind the wheel, body racked with stiffness. The two of them drove slowly up and down the grid of six short streets that composed Scobie Tree. There were foundation holes and the outlines of footings where buildings had been, and piles of paper-dry clapboards and framing wood where the structures had collapsed. A lot of hiding places if a zombie was prone. Danny remembered seeing some of them lie down in Forest Peak, although she didn’t know if that was commonplace. They might have died for good. In any case, nothing stirred. The town was empty.
As they made the circuit back to Central Avenue (Scobie’s brief claim to 114), Danny saw the motor home was no longer parked outside town. It was up at the gas station, and there were people swarming around.
“Ah shit,” she said, and accelerated.
They were looting. No other word for it.
Troy was standing by the gas pumps, filling the motor home’s immense tanks with diesel. The electric pumps were still getting power. He had his arms folded in an embarrassed posture as Danny pulled up. She popped the bubblegum lights on, and the survivors climbing in and out of the now-shattered front window of the general store dropped their swag and tried to look innocent. Danny was out of the car before the engine died.
“What the hell are you people doing?” she asked the nearest survivor. He was a midforties man, not tall.
He didn’t answer her question, but spoke to someone in the crowd: “Shoemaker,” he said, “tell her.”
“I’m asking
you
,” Danny said.
The one called Shoemaker stepped forward. “Let me handle this, Gluck,” he said.
Like this is a fucking traffic ticket
, Danny thought, and felt a spike of rage drive itself into her temple.
Shoemaker had an alert, serious face and made phony eye contact, looking very slightly not into Danny’s eyes. Hawaiian shirt with a muted pattern,
the only thing worse than a Hawaiian shirt with a loud pattern.
Probably a divorce lawyer
, Danny estimated. He was one of the men Danny had identified as troublemakers back at the rest area. He spoke in a low, confidential voice.
“Officer,” he began.
“Sheriff.”
“Sheriff, these people are hungry and they don’t all eat brie and caviar, which is what’s in that bus there.”
Patrick emerged from the motor home with a big white plastic bag full of trash. He didn’t look pleased. When he saw Danny was back, he rolled his eyes eloquently. Danny circled Shoemaker, but kept her gaze on the others ranged inside and outside the store. She raised her voice and was pleased to discover she could do so again.
“Listen up. Hungry and thirsty, I got it. You all didn’t have the keys, though, so you broke in. That’s a felony. We’re still in America, and the law still applies. You are all guilty of breaking and entering, theft, looting, and I’m sure I can come up with more, depending on who grabbed what. We are not going to do it this way. I’m not in a position to make arrests, but if you want to roll with my group, you observe the law—”
“Sheriff,” Shoemaker said, stepping slightly on Danny’s speech.
Definitely a lawyer
. “You don’t seem to understand the situation. I know you went through a lot back in that little town of yours, but we’re not there anymore. Heck, this isn’t even your jurisdiction,” he added, turning to take in the crowd around him. There were nods and murmurs. “We need to stock up for what certainly looks like a long drive. Just where are we going, by the way?”
More murmurs. A couple of people picked their loot back up. Danny saw Michelle and her brother deep in the shadows inside the store. Troy, arms still folded, walked over to stand next to Danny. The big man with the goatee was standing by the motor home with his hand resting on the metal skin like he didn’t want to risk getting left behind: She thought he was probably on her side as well, which was a surprise. She was grateful.
And she thought she had an answer to the question of where they were going that most of them would buy.
“I’m taking this stage by stage. We scope out an area, we move in. It could be there’s none of those things out here at all. Life goes on as normal. In which case, what you have done here is even worse. But we don’t know anything. The fact that you broke those windows may mean nobody has else stopped here. So the area could be clean. But we don’t know. What if those
things were inside? I don’t see any of the people that live here. Maybe they’re reanimated, right nearby. If they were in the store, you would have let them out. Those kids in there? How do we know there’s not a zombie in the freezer behind them?”
Danny pointed at Michelle and Jimmy James. They involuntarily stepped forward to the window, away from the freezer with its magnetic floor-length doors. A great hiding place, in fact. Danny thought she should remember that. The kids looked scared to death, but she wasn’t in a position to be delicate. It was probably the word
zombie
that got everybody on her side of the issue at last.
Now the survivors were shuffling away from the store, suddenly eager to get back to the safety of the motor home, but waiting for official permission.
“What’s your first name?” Danny asked Shoemaker. There was authority in last names. She would keep him on a first-name basis.
“Ted,” he replied.
“I had a deputy by that name. He’s dead now.”
“That sucks. Anyway, we’re just grabbing some supplies and moving on, and I think you can cut everybody some slack if we’re kind of in survival mode right about now, think so?”
Troy looked angry now. He stepped forward, well inside Ted’s personal space, but he didn’t say anything. The muscles in his jaw were jumping.
“How about the next people that come through?” Danny said.
Ted smiled. “They won’t have to break a window.”
Danny wanted to punch this glib cocksucker in the teeth. Her vision went red as she struggled not to lose her temper, the shadows filled with a blood-colored glow. Inside her head was a chaos of angry replies, shouting, fighting. Outside herself, she stood very still except for her fingers, which curled up into fists. But the line between inside and outside was hard for Danny to see. Then Amy was speaking from somewhere close behind her:
“Just remember, everybody: We don’t have the medical facilities to deal with an infected bite wound. Nobody does. There isn’t a working hospital for a hundred miles, maybe more.”
That did the trick. They were back on the road within five minutes.
They motored up the 12A toward the Mojave Desert. There was no traffic, which seemed strange. Danny had expected they would run into heavy refugee populations getting away from the cities.
This time, Danny was in the driver’s seat of the interceptor. She needed to project at least the illusion of control, or people were going to wander off and get killed. The radio was silent most of the time, except for the occasional lonely query from a unit somewhere out in the great, flat spaces. Danny wasn’t the only cop alive. But all the living cops were alone.
“I lost five men,” the first of these lonely voices told her. “One came back, and I let him in. He bit my arm. God help me, I blew his brains out. Now all I want to do is go to sleep.”
Everyone she spoke to over the radio was the last of their force, having survived the initial onslaught essentially by luck. They were on an isolated call, or sick in bed, or in one case stuck on the road with a dead battery. Danny thought the cop who related this story, from the Martell division, was probably lying. Cop cars didn’t get dead batteries. She tried not to blame him, but she did.
It looked like she was going to get away with her diversion into the desert. It did make sense, from a tactical standpoint, to get well clear of the population centers. She wasn’t acting entirely selfishly. It was just that, given two equal alternatives, she had chosen the one that would most likely lead her to her sister. Perfectly honorable thing to do, not like sitting out the crisis in a police car on a remote side road somewhere. Not nearly as bad as that.
Danny was hating herself. She couldn’t talk herself around to the idea that searching for Kelley with a bunch of fairly helpless people in tow was an okay decision. She knew damn well she was valuing one life above the rest—a life she’d failed to value enough before.
As she pulled out onto the deserted 12A, Danny looked back and saw one of the vehicles peel off from the convoy. It was a pickup truck with a camper shell on the back. The truck took the right-hand turn and headed south, the opposite direction. That meant there were now six vehicles, including the interceptor and the motor home, under her charge. If the entire Riverside contingent was in the truck, her little tribe of survivors was now six members smaller, as well.
They’re dead
, Danny thought, and felt a chilly curl of vindication in her belly.
Fuck it. Let them die
. The rest of her didn’t feel that way, but there was a small and vocal minority voice inside her head that hadn’t cared for people much, anyway, since she got back from the war. That voice was getting more airtime lately. She would have to watch that. It made the anger worse. She was starting to wonder if there was any difference at all between
these people and the people she had confronted in the desert of Mesopotamia.
They had been on the 12A for twenty minutes when they saw the first zombie.
It was at least half a mile away across an expanse of dirt that had once been a cattle stockyard, back when there was water. Danny wasn’t sure why she knew it was a zombie, but there could be no mistake. The figure was a short charcoal stroke on the bright, brown landscape, moving alongside a wire fence. Something about the way it moved.
Danny wondered what it was doing here. Hell, how did it get this far? She considered stopping to check the thing out, maybe neutralize it. But by that time, her charges would have had time to think again. They would have realized if there were zombies here, they could go another way where there might not be zombies at all. So Danny kept on going, hoping nobody in the motor home had seen it. The radio squawked, and Troy was speaking:
“Come in, Sheriff, you see? Over.”
“Hundred-and-four, out.”
She didn’t want to discuss it.
A few miles later, there was a possible answer to the question of where the thing came from. The convoy passed a long pair of wheel ruts that eased over the embankment of the highway and abruptly curved down into the deep drainage ditch below. A medium-duty white stakebed truck was overturned at the bottom.
Danny hefted the shotgun out of its cradle inside the interceptor and knelt at the edge of the ditch. Three zombies down there, scrabbling uselessly at the steep dirt walls of the ditch, unable to get out. Danny stood up, then fired the weapon from her hip. The gun bucked in her hands, and one after another the monsters collapsed.