There was something huddled at the front of the Buick.
Danny walked around the vehicle, giving it plenty of room. There was a
cell phone lying on the ground, and beside it, turned upside-down, a dusty campaign hat, similar to the one Danny had lost. Hunched over the radiator was the highway patrolman. His body was swollen, already decaying. The back of his head had been smashed in with a rock; the rock still lay inside the engine compartment, lodged between the firewall and the plastic engine cover. There was blood spatter on the underside of the hood of the car. But whoever had killed this man hadn’t taken his vehicle, which was strange. What was the motive? Danny was at once enraged to discover such a vicious crime, and analyzing the circumstances for clues. She wanted to smash the perpetrator’s head with the same rock. She also wanted to know why it had happened at all.
She looked inside the Buick, and had part of the answer. There was a zombie in the backseat, lying on its back and staring at her. The thing had been hog-tied. It was still active, but appeared to be in an advanced state of decay, considering it couldn’t have been dead more than three or four days. Then Danny saw it was the corpse of an old woman, with tangled silver-gray hair and skinny, wrinkled limbs. It couldn’t turn its glazed eyes to follow her; rather it turned its entire head. And when Danny walked out of view toward the back of the vehicle, the zombie struggled into a sitting position and watched her through the rear window, its chin pressed against the seat back.
Danny heard scraping footsteps. Down the road, coming around the corner past a furrowed jut of stone, was an undead adult male. One of its hands had been wrapped with strips of cloth. The bandaging had been done while the thing was still alive, because the cloth was stained with red blood, not black. There were big, oily stains in the crotch of its khakis and under the arms. Now Danny thought she knew what had happened: This man had been bitten by the old woman in the backseat.
He’d tied her up and was driving down the road when the Buick broke down. The cell phone suggested he had called the police while the system still worked, or maybe he never got through and the cop rolled by serendipitously. For some reason he got paranoid, or the patrolman said something he didn’t like—Danny thought the old woman was probably the subject—and the man smashed the officer’s head while he was looking at the engine. But the man died of the infection before he could switch vehicles.
Danny was angry. She was in a state of near-permanent hangover. Her skin was blistered and sore, and she stank, and she hated this whole nightmare situation.
The zombie shuffled toward her. The motor home was around a bend, nobody watching. Danny considered the shotgun, but picked up the fatal rock instead.
She took a chance getting close. The zombie was secreting foul-smelling fluid from its armpits, crotch, and mouth, as if the heat was causing it to dissolve. Its eyes were nearly opaque, but the thing knew right where she was, mouth yawning open. Could it taste her? Smell her?
Whatever. Danny crushed its temple with a single hard swing of the rock, and when the thing collapsed, she threw the rock at its head with both hands. She thought of her deputies, dead because she had needed them, and she wished there was some kind of built-in justice in the world. But there wasn’t. You had to make it yourself, and it was easy to get wrong.
Then Danny walked to the Buick, picked up the slain officer’s hat, slipped the Beretta out of the holster on his belt, and went back to the interceptor. She saluted the dead with her hip flask and took a long, burning pull of the liquor. Then she swallowed a mouthful of stale bottled water, radioed the all-clear to the rest of the convoy, and moved on.
The convoy rolled to a stop at the gates of Boscombe Field. The sun was going down. They had left the 137 behind for an even smaller road called Ore Creek Highway. It ran in a series of straight runs joined by long curves—the old wagon route—along the edge of Death Valley. They were now at least a hundred feet below sea level. Dim crags, almost two billion years old, imprisoned a lunar plain of jagged rock and sand. Rumpled yellow hills rose out of the dust at long intervals. The landscape was inhuman, ancient. It seemed too harsh to support life. Yet there were Joshua trees and golden grass and gnarled creosote bushes, tough survivors half-buried in the grit.
Ore Creek Highway ran through a series of old flat-bottomed river washes, shaped like branched lightning on the map. It was surrounded by tan sandstone hills, worn down until they resembled the biting surfaces of immense back teeth. Beyond the hills were low mountains, lacquered with rust, and beyond those were the distant blue crags. The road was in poor repair, having long been relegated to supporting the scant local traffic of prospectors, eccentrics, and park rangers, for whom potholes and cracks were a negligible inconvenience.
But Danny’s map had included the thing she was looking for: Boscombe
Field, represented by a tiny airplane silhouette, right at the edge of the valley in a place called Shoshone Springs. There was no town, only the airfield. The nearest settlements of any size were Lone Pine to the west and Pahrump to the east. There were a few tiny towns along the 190 that ran straight through Death Valley, but their populations were minuscule and Danny didn’t think zombies could walk that far in the Death Valley heat. Unless a lot of other people had thought of hiding out at Boscombe Field, it would be an ideal refuge in which to spend a couple of weeks, waiting to see what happened out in the world.
Danny rolled up first, according to the system they had agreed upon, with the rest of the vehicles idling a quarter of a mile down the road. She was wearing the dead officer’s hat and sidearm when she stepped out of the car. The airfield was laid out in the middle of a long, shallow slope of gravel that extended for another half mile before abruptly jutting up into fang-topped cliffs of dark dolomite. The entire installation was surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with accordion wire. It looked to be a couple of square miles in area. The entire near end of the place was paved, and there was a single paved runway jutting across the dirt beyond. Several helipads were painted on the tarmac at the near end, upon one of which squatted the big, red Sikorski S-61 Sea King helicopter Danny remembered. Its five drooping rotor blades made it look as if the machine was asleep. Behind the helicopter, two large sheet-metal hangars dominated the field. A Cessna high-wing spotting plane was parked in front of the far hangar, and there were a couple of civilian aircraft visible behind the enormous building. Five large metal tanks were ranged along the fence at the back of the hangars.
There was a low control tower on the opposite side of the runway. Not far from the main gates, along the same axis as the runway, was a terminal building, according to the routed wood sign above the door. This was a low ranch-style structure with big, broad windows and a two-story addition at one end. Assorted sheds and outbuildings completed the infrastructure. Danny knew there would be generators and a machine shop. Because the Death Valley fire suppression arsenal was based here, there might also be emergency medical facilities. And there were probably showers.
Nobody was there. After a few attempts to raise someone on the radio and another with the interceptor’s loudspeaker, Danny used the regulation bolt-cutters to lop through the chain that bound the gates shut. Then she drove through the gates over a cast-iron cattle guard, into the parking area
in front of the terminal. There were no crows in the sky, but a couple of hawks circled a mile away at a tremendous height. Danny had seen no zombies and no sign of traffic on the road. This remote corner of the world appeared to be deserted.
She drove around the outsides of all the major structures at Boscombe Field, then up and down the runway, watching the surrounding landscape for the undead. Over the last couple of days they’d seen them occasionally, away in the distance, little apostrophes punctuating the empty desert. How they got where they were, and where they were going, it was impossible to guess. Danny knew that for every standing zombie she saw, there could be ten more lying prone, out of sight. She saw none here at the airfield, so she reported back by radio: “Come on in, White Whale and Minnows. There may be a few zombies, but I haven’t seen them yet. Shut the gates behind you. This place could be sterile, and if it is we’re going to keep it that way.”
There was a collection of vehicles parked in the foremost hangar near the gates: In the front rank there was a small tanker truck for spraying firefighting chemicals, and a push-back tractor with wheels as tall as its body. Behind those was a light-duty pickup, an older sedan, a couple of golf carts, and a portable generator. In the back, hidden under a tarpaulin, was an immaculate 1957 Thunderbird with the original Starmist Blue paint.
Wulf emerged from the second hangar and gave the all-clear, at the same moment Topper got the generator going inside a big shed between the two hangars. Danny stepped out of the control tower building across the asphalt yard and raised her thumb in the air. They had already cleared the terminal building, and most of the survivors were inside it. Patrick hadn’t yet joined the party; he was once again cleaning out the White Whale.
“Topper, let’s do the perimeter together,” Danny called. Topper sketched a salute and headed for the fence that surrounded the airfield. He took a position opposite Danny, with Ernie following after him. Wulf shambled toward the RV, one hand thrust down the back of his evil pants, scratching. Danny started walking down the fence, Topper keeping pace on the far side. All members of the search team were equipped with short-range walkie-talkies that Troy had found inside the first hangar, neatly pegged onto a charging rack over a workbench.
The paved runway surface was about three thousand feet long, and before they’d gone a quarter of that distance, Danny could feel the sun eating into her skin through the rips in her shirt. She was glad for the hat.
They all needed new clothes, except maybe Wulf. For him, four or five days in the same underwear was just the beginning.
If
he wore underwear, Danny reflected. The desert beyond the fence wobbled in the heat, the horizon lost in a salty haze. Danny could see a mirage of glittering water out there on the flat desert floor.
“I got a couple here, Sheriff,” Topper said over the walkie-talkie, about halfway down the runway. “I’ll drop ’em.”
“No,” Danny replied. “Wait for me.”
She trotted across the tarmac to where Ernie and Topper were leaning against the wire, watching a pair of the undead lurch toward them over the margin of crushed gravel riprap around the fence. Topper had his dead friend Mike’s automatic in his hand, but he refrained from the coup de grace according to Danny’s wishes. Both bikers seemed to respect her commands, Danny was glad to observe. She’d been on her best behavior since Agua Rojo, and between that and taking most of the dangerous jobs herself, she seemed to have gotten everybody to trust her again.
Danny hooked her fingers through the fence and looked at the undead. One was a small Hispanic girl in a pink princess dress. She was missing her right arm at the shoulder, except for an elbow-length flap of skin that hung down her side. The other one was a portly adult male in boxer shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt. His bare feet were in tatters. How the zombies got here, Danny could not imagine. Maybe they rolled off one of those trucks full of corpses. Maybe the things had walked all the way over the mountains. Maybe—Danny couldn’t come up with anything. She looked at the little girl. She was wearing scuffed black patent leather shoes with straps across the instep. Kelley had always wanted a pair of those when she was small, but had to make do with no-name running shoes from Wal-Mart instead.
“Let’s take ’em down,” Topper said. He was obviously unnerved by the walking corpse of the child.
“No,” Danny said.
“Is this one of your rules, or is it a law?” Topper said, turning to face Danny. Maybe her hold on them wasn’t as strong as she thought.
“Let’s watch them. We can see if they have any problem-solving ability. And they’ll show us any gaps in the perimeter.”
Ernie nodded vigorously. “She’s good, Topper. You should ask her out,” he said.
Topper handed Ernie the gun.
“You keep watch, Cochise.”
•
Despite its name, the terminal building wasn’t so much a waystation as a bunkhouse, loosely modeled after the live-in facilities of a fire station: There was a communal kitchen, a dining hall, and a recreation room, both leading off a broad foyer at the front door. There were large bathrooms with multiple stall showers and wall-length mirrors over counters inset with half a dozen sinks. One was marked
Aviators
and the other
Aviatrixes
; the male facilities were twice the capacity of the female ones, reflecting the demographics of the relatively male world of aviation. In the upstairs addition was a long dormitory with three small private rooms, each with two single beds, and communal sleeping quarters with bunks for another twenty people, divided into male and female rooms. This arrangement was usually altogether empty, but during an outbreak of wildfires the entire place would be crammed with pilots, firefighters, and ground crew.
Between the canned goods, the showers, and the commercial washing machine, the survivors felt like they’d landed in heaven. Danny was no longer the crazy hard-ass cop. She was their savior.
Amy took the second-to-last shower. Among the women, only Danny had yet to bathe. It was the fourth night of the disaster, the fifth night since Kelley ran away, and they had, at last, found a scrap of normalcy in the mad universe.
The hot water seemed to be inexhaustible and there was a gallon jug of cheap strawberry-scented shampoo. The lights were on, there was a thousand-gallon tank of diesel feeding the generator, and everybody had feasted on boiled rice, Vienna sausages from jars, and succotash from a huge tin that reminded Danny of the spilled jalapeños on the floor of the Wooden Spoon, and therefore of scorched human flesh. She had skipped the meal on the pretext of checking the perimeter one more time. But the rest of them were fed and clean and feeling a little more secure on the safe side of a twelve-foot fence.