She walked back to the interceptor. Troy and Patrick were standing beside it, now, alongside Amy. Nobody had spoken a word. They stood and scuffed the ground and looked out across the huge landscape, with its arid, treeless mountains looming up above the highway on one side and the ever-expanding desert flats on the other, its far margin indicated in the distance by more mountains, a pale violet saw-blade along the horizon.
“What are we going to do?” said Troy.
“Keep moving,” Danny said.
“Where?” Patrick asked.
“Away from these things,” Danny replied.
“I get the feeling there’s no ‘away,’” Amy said. She was holding her elbows in her hands, rubbing them as if it was cold. In fact it was hot and they were starting to sweat in the sun.
Danny could feel the heat etching into her blistered scalp. She needed a hat. “If we keep on going, we will reach a point where the people that did this—” Here Danny pointed toward the overturned truck with her chin—“couldn’t get to, before the change happened. I’m guessing what went down here is these things came to life and the driver wasn’t expecting it. He lost control and crashed. Say there are others that didn’t crash. How far did they get before the zombies started attacking? How long was it for us, five or six hours? Longer?”
Patrick looked like he was going to cry, but his voice was even and cool. “So what you’re saying is this perimeter thingy of yours just got pushed out, am I right?”
Danny nodded, nudging a pebble around the edge of her shadow with her toe.
“Yeah. I gave it a hundred-kilometers radius. Sixty-odd miles from downtown. We’re a hundred miles from downtown right now.”
“As the crow flies?” Amy asked.
“By road,” Danny said. But Amy wasn’t really speaking to her; she was looking at some crows circling above their heads.
“I like crows. They’re the most intelligent bird, did you know that?” Amy continued.
Irritated, Danny opened her mouth to speak, and as suddenly as she became angry, it was gone, erased by realization. There was method in Amy’s madness.
The crows
, she thought.
Like that Hitchcock movie
.
“We should keep our eyes out for crows,” Amy said. “They like to keep an eye out for dead things.”
With that, Amy shoved the first-aid kit back into the trunk of the interceptor and went to sit in the shade of the open passenger-side door, leaving Danny to reel in her thoughts.
Patrick and Troy were squinting up into the bright sky, watching how the crows circled overhead with their sleek black heads cocked down at the scene. It was time to make a decision, Danny knew. Another decision. Always another. She could hear the hot wind keening through the desert scrub, the cry of a crow, and the idling engine of the motor home.
The whole world seemed to be waiting.
“Let’s push the radius of our safe zone out another fifty miles,” Danny said, calculating in her head, picturing the big map. “Joshua Tree or Twenty-nine Palms east, uh…Barstow north. Forget west and south. Lancaster and Palm Springs. Too many people.”
“Palm Springs was full of zombies to begin with,” Patrick muttered.
They were on the road again. Troy radioed to Danny a few minutes after they were rolling. “Come in, Sheriff, this is RV, over.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s been a lot of discussion while I was away. Thought you should know, out.”
Danny’s stomach knotted.
Shit
. Those stupid bastards were second-guessing her every move, of course. That slimeball Ted Shoemaker was probably the ringleader. There might need to be another come-to-Jesus moment pretty soon.
“Ten-four, out,” Danny said, and hung up the handset.
Amy had her forehead against the window, almost as if asleep, but she said, “Too many control freaks, not enough Indians.”
Danny didn’t want to discuss it. “That was a damn good idea with the crows. Could save some lives,” she said instead.
They drove in silence for a while, the mile markers flashing past on the side of the road. Signs for little desert towns that would probably be gone in ten years, zombies or no zombies. There simply wasn’t anything worth staying for. The price of gas was so high, the weather that much drier.
People in remote reaches of America had started to drift back in, closer to the big places. It had happened in Forest Peak. Some families couldn’t afford the commute down to the flatlands, so they moved.
Turns out not to matter
, Danny mused. Price of gas, length of commute, global warming. All wiped off the list of pressing concerns for an indefinite period of time—maybe forever. Her thoughts were churning, following no pattern. There wasn’t enough information to start tinkering with a new working hypothesis yet. They would just have to see how far things went.
Instead, she tried to organize her memories of the last couple of days, to make some sense of the death and chaos. But all that came into her mind were snippets of irrelevant nonsense, like those envelopes of photo prints that accumulated at the back of a drawer when all the good ones were tucked away in an album: pictures of people’s thumbs, accidental shots of
shoes or the corner of a building or somebody blinking when they were supposed to say “cheese.”
What the hell were the monsters that had stood up and started killing people? How could they be dead, and yet want to eat? Were they dead? Had the definition of death changed, and Danny was only slow to catch on?
That they could move, that their eyes could see, did not make them living things. They were no more alive than the closed-circuit cameras that clustered under the eaves of public buildings, craning their motorized necks to watch the passers-by. And yet, what made a man alive?
Danny struggled across this alien philosophical terrain, not knowing where to begin. What was life? Was it the intelligence within? The beat of a heart? The suck of lungs? Her comatose war buddy, Harlan, had been alive. Danny felt sure of it, even though she had sat at his bedside for a week and he’d manifested less life in a practical sense than these infected things. She had held his hand that felt nothing, looked into his eyes that saw nothing, and spoken to a mind that could not form thoughts, but it was still Harlan there on the bed with all the tubes and wires. Even though he would never come back. He was, in some way that Danny yearned to define, alive.
And these walking corpses were not.
Danny’s thoughts were in shorthand, as ever. She thought all of these things, but in the minimum of words:
They’re like security cameras. How come they’re still dead even if they can move?
And:
Harlan’s alive, even if he’s not in there. So why aren’t they?
Then Danny found herself staring at Kelley’s note fluttering on the dashboard. She tucked it back into her pocket, this time vowing silently to read it before the sun went down.
Sunset in the desert. The sky was a deep bronze bowl, molten red where the sun burned down toward its lip. Danny and her entire contingent of survivors rolled into the town of Riverton Junction.
Their progress was agonizingly slow: In the Mustang, on an ordinary afternoon, Danny could have made it here from Forest Peak in less than three
hours. It had taken the convoy an entire day. Danny still hadn’t looked at the note.
Another tiny place, Riverton Junction even owed its name to somewhere else: A train line passed through, running east-west with a spur line to Riverton, thirty miles north, where there was a profitable bauxite mine. This was nothing but the junction of the two lines. There were a dozen low frame houses and some trailers, spread out over a junkyard landscape that could otherwise have been on Mars. A church with a tin steeple. Some metal cow sheds from back when beef came this way by rail, headed for the several military installations in the area. And miles of barbed-wire fence. Riverton had one paved street that intersected with a road running alongside the railroad tracks. The rest of the streets were scratched into the dirt across it like the spurs on an old-fashioned television antenna.
What mattered was that Riverton had a gas station and a grocery store, although Danny wasn’t holding out hope that either one would provide much selection. She had discussed their approach into town at a brief halt a few miles outside the settled area. The smaller vehicles at the back of the convoy would cruise the side streets, looking for signs of life, or zombies. Danny would ride point to the town center. The motor home would wait for the all-clear outside town.
Danny and Amy were alone as the last wafer of the brilliant orange sun slipped below the mountains to the west. The interceptor rolled to a stop in the middle of Leche Avenue, Riverton’s main street. Danny took the place in at a glance. On one side there were a couple of commercial buildings—a feed and hardware store and a surveyor’s office. On the other side was the general store, which wasn’t any bigger than the Quik-Stop, and looked much poorer. Next to the store was the gas station with its three pumps. There was a big sheet-metal roof over the pumps, and even with the fading light the heat rippling off the roof was visible against the sky. It was ticking and groaning as it cooled. Hand-cut plywood letters on the roof spelled TEXICO, suggesting the gasoline available might be generic. What caught Danny’s eye, however, was the tableau beside the pumps.
Three motorcycles were parked there, two choppers and a restored vintage Hog. There were three corpses, as well.
Danny warned Amy to stay where she was and sit low, then eased out of the interceptor, availing herself of the shotgun that came with it. She had no idea if the weapon was loaded, but regulations stipulated it should be.
Her mind slipped back in time to another desert not long ago, and she was filled with the kind of fear that borders on elation. Hide-and-go-seek with killers. She had always won the game, so far, and she thought she might be better at it than most people.
Danny scuttled crabwise from the interceptor to the recessed vestibule at the entrance to the store. No shots, no answering sound of running feet as hidden assailants ran for better cover. It occurred to Danny that she should have called Wulf to cover her. He was a badly damaged human being, but he was vigilant as hell and he could shoot.
The town radiated fading heat and emptiness. There were even tumble-weeds down by the railroad tracks. Danny slid along the façade of the store and knelt by the trash barrels at the side of the gas station lot. No signs of life. Even the dead weren’t moving. She broke open the gun and checked it: It was fully loaded.
“Come out!” Danny called. Somebody had to be around. These people didn’t die of mutual suicide. “My deputies and me are here to take you to safety.”
No answer. Danny looked around her at the low, falling-apart buildings, the cracked pavement, the short, scrubby trees. There were a couple of old cars parked at the curb in both directions, in and out of town. Maybe the entire population was holed up in the church, or maybe they all got out of town in one school bus. Probably no more people lived in Riverton Junction than Danny had under her tender care in the convoy.
She decided to take a risk, because otherwise she could spend the rest of the night crouched by the stinking trash, and her knees were too sore for that. She rose slowly, holding the shotgun in a relaxed position, but ready to switch up if circumstances changed. Then she did her breathing for a few seconds and walked as casually as she could toward the gas pumps. It was the same casual walk she had developed in Iraq. It was bullshit, but you couldn’t tell from a distance.
Two of the corpses by the scooters were dressed in dusty, worn-out ordinary clothing that had been washed too seldom, and yet too often. Locals. A man in his fifties and a woman some years older. The third corpse was a smallish man with a long mustache. He was dressed to ride, in chaps, leather jacket, and red bandanna. He had some very good boots on, and Danny found part of her mind wondering if they were her size. Her own boots were ruined, the soles melted and cracked.
All three corpses had been shot in the head. She squatted down among them, looking at the wounds. Then she heard a soft noise behind her and spun around.
Amy was out of the interceptor and strolling across the street. Danny made throat-cutting motions, but Amy just made them back. Hopeless.
“Troy wants to know if it’s clear,” Amy asked, in an ordinary speaking voice. Danny all but threw herself flat on the ground. This was exactly how to draw enemy fire.
“Obviously not,” Danny hissed.
“That’s what I told him. They say the rest of the town is empty.”
“Awesome,” Danny said.
“What’s the problem here?” Amy asked. “We’ve been seeing dead people all day.”
“Look at the blood,” Danny said.
Two of the corpses, the locals, had bled the dark slime of the zombie. The biker had bled red blood, and plenty of it.
“Murder,” Danny said, and Amy crouched down beside her.
Danny was trying to figure out what to do next. Whoever killed these three were well within their rights to shoot zombies, as far as Danny was concerned. But the biker was alive, red-blooded and aware when he went down. No matter how bad the situation was, murder was murder. Yet whoever had done this didn’t seem to have a motive: The bikes were gassed up and ready to go. Didn’t they want to steal them? Unless the bikes belonged to companions of the dead man. Maybe they had been attacked and were hiding somewhere. Danny absentmindedly reached over and touched the cylinder head of one of the choppers. It was hot, running hot. Now she had an idea. But at this moment, a sound was rising from the distance. She looked down Leche Street and saw the motor home rumbling toward them, the headlights like big bug eyes in the fading light. It pulled up behind the interceptor and rumbled to a stop.
Troy jumped down out of the driver’s seat, and moments later several of the survivors came out of the side door.
“What the fuck,” Danny said, standing up. In a target-rich environment like this there was no point in keeping low.
Troy hitched a thumb over his shoulder. “Ask him,” he said, and knelt to examine the bodies. Ted in the Hawaiian shirt was coming up behind Troy, a look of vindication on his face. Patrick and Wulf, an unexpected pair,
emerged together. Danny realized a few moments later that they were deep into an argument. Then Ted was standing at the curb, surveying the scene at the gas pumps.