“Did you ever see
The Day the World Ended
? That was awesome. I saw it when I was six. It scared the hell out of me…Also black and white,” Danny concluded, lamely.
“Starring who?”
“It has a three-eyed mutant with extra arms.”
“I see. We also have
Night of the Living Dead
here. Weaver’s choice, not mine. Maybe we should watch it to see if there are any pointers we could use.”
“Weird how much this situation…” Danny trailed off, thoughtful.
That was something that mystified her. The real plague was so similar to the made-up one in the old movies. Not in every way, of course. But the idea that it bore
any
similarity was weird. How could the dead get up again? That was strange enough. But the dead eating the living—it was as if God was having a laugh at mankind’s expense. Or the other way around. The theory had been forming in Danny’s head that this disease must be engineered somehow. She didn’t go in much for theories that lacked practical applications, but the more you knew your enemy, the more you knew how to win.
“You know how they figured out how to splice genes to order?” Danny said.
Patrick’s eyebrows went up. “Apropos of what?”
“What’s ‘apropos’?”
“I mean where did that come from?”
“Zombies. Real zombies. We’re talking about old movies, and I’m wondering if maybe the Iranians or North Korea or somebody has a disease factory set up and made this thing to order. Especially North Korea. I hear their guy, Kim Jing Ding or whatever his name is, he’s a big movie buff. Maybe they chopped up some DNA and sewed it back together for him. A little of this, a little of that, right? And made a zombie disease.”
Patrick shook his head. “Jesus, I don’t know. I’m still trying to get my head around everything that’s happened, and you’re doing detective work to figure out whodunit.”
Danny stood up and ran her fingers over her short-cropped head again. Patrick was right. No point speculating on the big picture. She was thinking way ahead of where they needed to be.
“I gotta go see if my uniform is dry yet,” she said.
“How does it feel?” Patrick asked, as Danny reached for the door handle. She paused.
“I guess I’m glad I told you.”
“I mean how does your back feel? We rubbed two hundred bucks on it last night.”
In the end it came down to this, once the supplies were counted and the rate of burn estimated: They could last a month without ever setting foot outside the airfield fence, if they lived modestly. Food was the shortest supply. But foraging parties could probably reach out into the sparse communities around Boscombe Field and put together enough sustenance for another few weeks, after which they would have to venture into the big cities.
A long-distance supply run would have been the perfect excuse for Danny to leave the airfield for a few days, but nobody liked the idea. Ultimately Danny didn’t argue the point. They could wait until the supplies were low, then make the foraging run. It was all the same to Danny.
She was leaving either way.
There was a narrow slice of moon hung low in the starry sky. The night was hot, but a little breeze was blowing down off the mountains and it might be quite chilly by morning. The Milky Way arched up through the velvet darkness, a bridge of stars halfway to infinity, and the world below was bathed in darkness and quiet. A hermit come down from the mountains would not have known there was anything amiss. Boscombe Field showed a couple of cheerful lights in windows, the generator rumbled in its shed, and except for the evening watch patrolling the perimeter fence, it was a scene of reassuring order and calm. Danny didn’t like it.
She wasn’t the only one. On her patrol around the airfield, Danny found Wulf sitting in the depths of a hangar doorway. He was staring out into the darkness beyond the perimeter. Danny studied his profile. His skin was so wrinkled, each line as sharply defined as a razor cut, that he almost appeared to have been shattered and reassembled by someone unhandy. His bent, purple nose and the wilderness of yellowed whiskers beneath it caught the overhead light and seemed to glow on their own.
Danny wanted to thank Wulf for saving her life and Amy’s, but she knew he’d shrug it off with a curse. He liked shooting the undead, that was all. She saw that he had a way of moving his lips as if speaking, even when he was not. She wondered if there was a voice in there, below the surface, making his lips move. She wondered if she moved her own lips when the voice was speaking inside her own head.
Then Wulf spoke aloud, surprising Danny: “You having trouble sleeping, Sheriff? Nightmares?”
“None of your business.”
“I been there. Come back after three years in combat, nobody gets what you been through, so you shut them out. Can’t keep a relationship going. Sent that man of yours packing, right? Don’t let anybody too close. Feelings are dangerous. You even kept your little sister at arm’s length.”
Danny didn’t like this line of reasoning at all. This old bag of shit wasn’t allowed to mention Kelley.
“We were talking about you, not me.”
“I’m talking about both of us. Can’t trust people, don’t like surprises. Always got one eye on the tree line looking for VC or the Mujahideen or whoever it is, other eye still seeing what you went through back there…Ain’t no way to live.”
“If I want a shrink,” Danny said, with great dignity, “I’ll find one that lives indoors, okay?”
Wulf spat on the ground and turned to confront Danny, and now the light caught only half of his face, like a close-up picture of a quarter moon, with the rims of craters and mountains lit up on one side, and darkness on the other. His one illuminated bloodshot eye glistened in its nest of ravaged skin.
“Every day it gets a little worse,” he said, and spittle flecked his beard. “Right now you can bury yourself in the job, folks think you’re a hard-working little girl. But ten years from now, if you’re still around, the ghosts will still be crawling up on you, the enemy coming to kill you in the dark, and you’ll be drowning the sons of bitches in alcohol just so’s you can get out of bed. And one day you won’t even go to bed. Then we can talk about
me
.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” Danny retorted. “Post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I can handle it. Not everybody that goes through combat ends up a fuckin’ derelict like you.”
Wulf wasn’t listening. He was looking out into the darkness again, combing his beard with his fingers.
“Every night your buddies die in the mud again, and you kill some foreign shithead right back for it, and you bury ’em all in the back of your mind. Every day, you’re surrounded by civilians so goddamn useless, they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the bottom. It makes you mad, don’t it? Makes you so damn mad you hate your friends for it. You get to feeling pretty alone after a while. And then, a while after that, you
are
alone.”
“And what do you do about it?”
The question came out of Danny’s mouth without her permission. Wulf had her full attention. She wanted to know if he had an answer, despite the shape he was in. Maybe something that would work better for her than it worked for him. He turned his old eyes back upon her, and Danny felt a dislocated sense of shame again.
“I go camping,” Wulf said. “I been camping pretty steady since nineteen hundred and ninety-one.”
Danny walked into the tower building. The downstairs consisted of an office and a place to park a vending machine; the rest was occupied by a flight of perforated metal stairs leading upward. She paused to inspect the contents of the vending machine—it was the usual assortment of brand-name candy and weird snack items nobody would ever eat.
Unless they were surrounded by zombies and there was nothing else
, the voice reminded her. Amy came in through the same door behind Danny, yawning. Danny waved her away and put her boot on the bottom step of the stairs. Amy put her hand over Danny’s, pressing it to the handrail.
“Wait,” Amy said. “I’m worried about what you’ve got in mind.”
“I got nothing in mind,” Danny said.
Amy was looking right through her. “Now that we’re here, you’re thinking of going off alone.”
Danny turned her eyes to the window. She could see nothing there but her own reflection. “Why do you say—”
“Listen,” Amy interrupted. “I read Kelley’s note, and I know you. You don’t like people handing you problems you can’t solve. It’s gotta be eating you up. But there’s two ways it can go. Kelley is alive, or Kelley is not alive. In either case, your job is to keep on living. No lone wolfing it.”
“Where do you get that idea?”
“Come on. You know it’s true.”
Danny scrubbed her face with her hands, stinging both face and hands,
neither of which were fit to be scrubbed. She felt tired and itchy and stupid again. She didn’t want to be questioned.
“I gotta find her, Amy. Even if she’s one of them. In her letter she said I promised to come back and I never did. I gotta do better this time.”
“That guy Patrick. You passed out but I stayed up with him. While you were snoring, he was crying, all last night—because of his friend Weaver.”
“Yeah, but he knows Weaver is dead. Kelley’s in mumbo.”
Amy laughed out loud: “In limbo, you mean.”
Danny was angry again, emotion flashing up. She wished it wasn’t so much easier to be pissed off than to try to figure everything out and explain herself.
“Okay, limbo. Big fucking deal. You said we were in Doom Valley before. It’s Death Valley. You always call things the wrong thing.”
Amy was not set back by this speech. She laughed again, fondly, and that was even worse. Danny didn’t want Amy to be affectionate with her. It made her plans harder to carry out.
“You got a damn weird sense of humor, you know that?” Danny said, looking for a reaction.
Amy smiled, but now her eyes were sad. “And you have no sense of humor whatsoever. It’s a part of your charm. Things will get back to normal, Danny. I think they will.”
Danny flailed her free hand around her head, shooing the idea away. “For who? The survivors? The zombies? Normal is gone.”
Danny pulled away from Amy and walked up the perforated metal stairs to the control tower. She could hear the door below slam as Amy left, and she felt guilty and mean.
The control tower’s air traffic control room was a small space, with walls of green glass that angled sharply outward from the bottom to the top to reduce glare in the daytime. Maria was at the radio. Most of the gear looked ancient and barely adequate, the technology utterly outmoded. But the satellite radio was extraordinarily good gear for such a remote outpost. Danny got the sense that they had built this place to expand, but had never expanded it. Except for the glorious communications device before which Maria now sat.
“How long have you been at it?” Danny asked. Maria carefully rotated a coffee cup on the console so that the handle made a full circuit.
“Since morning.”
“Take any breaks?”
“A couple. I’ll sleep up here for now.” She looked exhausted, her brown face yellowish.
“Save your energy,” Danny said. “We’ll be here at least another week, no matter what happens, okay? If they heard you, they heard you. They know where the signal is coming from.”
“Who is they?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know,” Danny said, and wished she had any talent for lying.
A bad liar, but perfectly capable of omission, the negative space surrounding a lie. Danny had intended to wait another night, to make sure things were entirely quiet and everyone was settled. But after tonight’s unpleasant interviews, it was time. She’d had the plan in place since before Riverton Junction, but originally it was supposed to be a kind of side venture along with protecting as many living people as she could. Now, however, the people she had were safe enough. She could easily be back before they ran out of supplies. Unless she died, in which case it was a moot point. But they were only going to hold her back, and make speeches about how fucked up she was, and wander off to piss in the bushes and get attacked by zombies.
There were a couple of gallons of water stashed in the interceptor, and some energy bars. She had enough ammunition to stage the end of
The Wild Bunch
, thanks to the zeal of the California Highway Patrol purchasing department. She even had a box of Road Blocker rounds, shotgun casings with a single ball inside, capable of penetrating an engine block. And she had Kelley’s note, once again tucked in her shirt pocket. She waited until one in the morning, pretending to sleep on the couch in the downstairs office of the tower. Maria was snoring upstairs. It was time.
One of the light aircraft parked on the edge of the tarmac was a high-wing Piper, and the tip of its wing was only a couple of feet from one of the pressurized fire retardant tanks. These tanks stood higher than the fence, and less than four feet away from it. The fence was there to keep people out, not in. Danny’s presence around the airport at all hours was expected by the watches, so when Simon, sitting out his watch in the control tower, saw her walk across the pavement with a rucksack in her hand, he thought nothing of it. She moved off into the shadows behind the hangars. It didn’t occur to him to make note of her return, so he didn’t realize it never happened.
The interceptor was parked on the far side of the illuminated area beneath the single exterior light that burned above the airfield gates. That was
also part of Danny’s plan. A watchman’s eyes would get accustomed to the darkness. From the tower he could see miles of desert. But he would have one blind spot: the glare of that single light. The light was exactly positioned between the tower and the interceptor.
When Danny pushed the car down the shallow slope of Boscombe Field Road, following the example of Ted and his fellow escapees, Simon didn’t see it. Whether or not he saw the taillights when she started the engine a half-mile away, it hardly mattered. She was gone.
The miles swept beneath Danny’s wheels.