Aiming a second blow with the rolling pin, Danny dropped the coiled hose and the plastic jugs. She gathered them back up in a messy bundle and moved deeper into the hotel, gripping the rolling pin. She might keep it. It was better than a baseball bat.
The hotel was silent. There were too many doors for safety. Sidling past each doorway, ready to strike, she found an elderly female sitting in an office down the hall beyond the kitchen. Her hair was white, knotted atop her head, and she wore an old-fashioned black dress with a high collar. When Danny moved into the doorway, the old woman looked up. The eyes were dead.
The undead thing rose to its feet, taking halting steps toward Danny. She considered smashing its head the way she’d done to the cook—but instead, Danny simply closed the office door. The old zombie scratched at the other side of the wood, but it didn’t have the wit to operate the doorknob.
There was a dining room beyond the office, in which Danny found a plump female zombie that had once been dark-skinned, but was now an eerie gunmetal color. It was dressed in some kind of aproned pink outfit, maybe a chambermaid. There was no door to close, here. Danny would have to kill this one. She put down the jugs and the hose and broke eye contact with the walking corpse. When she looked up again, it was shockingly close to her. It came at Danny with a speed she hadn’t reckoned on.
She struck it haphazardly across the face with the rolling pin, knocking the nose and jaw profoundly out of alignment. The creature stopped, but only to reorient itself to Danny’s position. Its fat hands whipped out at her. Danny swung the rolling pin again, and this time one of the zombie’s slack, jowled arms came up in a distinct gesture of self-defense. The bones cracked, and the hand flopped loosely around at the end of the arm. Unfazed, it renewed the attack. Panic surged up inside Danny’s chest.
The thing’s broken jaw worked up and down, the lower teeth so dislocated they waved out of the side of the face. Danny whacked it again, this time straight down on top of the head. The chambermaid collapsed, vomiting one long spurt of black liquid at her boots, then was still.
Danny’s heart was pounding. This zombie was fast—faster than any of the ones she had seen so far.
The adrenaline kicked her thinking into gear. There were more capable zombies out there. Maybe it was because this one had been indoors, not rotting in the sun. It was still slower than even the dullest human being, but this one could
move
. Maybe some of the undead were faster than usual, the infection or chemical or whatever it was working differently on their nervous systems. Danny would have to factor that into her plans. Even here in Potter, she would have to amend her approach: She didn’t want to find herself surrounded if they could react with the speed of this one.
Danny was still formulating a fresh plan when a hand fell stiffly on her shoulder.
Raw fear jetted into her system and she spun free, the rolling pin already coming up—it was the old woman from the office. Behind it the office door stood open. She wasn’t any faster than the others.
But she had opened that door
.
Danny clipped the old thing in the mouth with the rolling pin on the upswing, then clubbed the white-haired head to the floor on the return stroke. The thin arms reached for her, even as the creature fell. The scars on Danny’s back prickled and itched with the sudden injection of fear. Danny stomped once, hard, on the wrinkled, sunken face. The skull broke beneath her foot like a china teapot wrapped in rags. The thing shuddered and went still. Danny felt growing terror, and she forced it to subside. Terror led to panic, and panic killed.
There were French doors at the rear of the dining room. They opened on to a patio at the back of the hotel. The patio ended in a low, gated iron fence, and beyond that was the parking lot. Danny moved swiftly. Beyond the fence was space for thirty or forty cars. The lot was full. The entire scene, from the hedges around the parking area, to the buildings, the paving, and the cars, was entirely floured in pale dust. There were bodies here, as well. Danny could see the head and shoulders of a corpse or zombie propped up inside a Jeep with a rag top and no doors. Was that only rotting tissue, or was it a threat? There were more of them on the ground, all around. One was an infant. They were motionless, but no crows had ventured into the enclosed yard. Several birds were perched on wires overhead, but none had settled in the parking area.
Danny was at the French doors now, crouching. She pulled the hose off her shoulder and uncoiled it. It was much too long. She had intended to siphon two gas tanks at once, but she would never have time. She cut the hose five feet from one end. That would be enough. She checked the action
of the shotgun. There were too many things to carry. The rolling pin would have to stay behind.
There was a minivan near the patio gate. It might offer some cover for Danny while she sucked the gas through the pipe. After that, the siphoning action would work on its own, and she could keep moving around the lot if she had to. Gravity would take care of the rest. Even if a dozen zombies were coming for her, as long as she could eventually make it back around to the jug and run away with it, her mission was accomplished. A gallon of gas was enough to get her somewhere safer. But the minivan would also obscure her view.
She saw one of the 1980s Mustangs like her first, a few cars back from her position. An ugly piece of shit. But it offered a nice view all around, being a low vehicle. She could try taking the gas from that one. But would anybody that drove one of those mullet-mobiles keep the tank topped up? A better car might have more gas in it, simply because the owner could afford it.
Something was moving around inside the hotel. Somewhere behind her. Maybe there had been a zombie upstairs that was coming down to investigate. She had to make a choice, now.
Danny pushed the French doors open and moved outside. The heat inside and out was equally oppressive, but the air outside was tainted with the stink of rotting bodies. Nothing on the patio to be worried about: She saw a corpse, but it was a proper one, with the head bashed in. An iron umbrella stand lay next to it. There were useful skull-smashing weapons everywhere, if you were willing to improvise.
Danny kept her body parallel to the ground and scooted to the hedge, then looked over the top of it. The longer she could delay her discovery, the better her chances of getting the vital gasoline. She scanned the cars and saw, from her fresh angle, an ideal candidate: a vintage two-door Jaguar in good condition. It wouldn’t have a locking gas cap, it would have a short filler tube, and it wasn’t too far into the parking lot.
Danny checked the ground for zombies. None between her and the minivan, at least. She hustled across that distance, then checked again, keeping her motions sure and swift. Momentum was key. She made it to the ugly Mustang, then scuttled crabwise to the Jaguar, keeping an eye on two bodies she could now see lying on the far side of the minivan. They might get active. She pried the filler door on the Jag’s gas tank open and fed the hose in. The tang of gasoline fumes joined the thick, dull smell of decaying meat.
A cloud of crows rose into the air. Danny followed them with her eyes,
sucking the air out of the free end of the hose. She could taste the gasoline vapors, and wished she had found a narrower tube. The hose took almost more vacuum pressure than she could create with her lungs. She could feel the resistance inside it, the counterweight from the rising column of gasoline.
And then she heard the moaning.
The undead beside the minivan stirred in the dirt. They weren’t up yet. They were emerging from the trance or coma they had been in. Prey was here at last.
One of the zombies was looking around now, its trunk supported on its arms. It hadn’t yet stood up. Danny saw another one on the edge of her vision, and turned to see a male zombie around her age. It was lurching toward her on naked feet.
She sucked again at the hose, the negative pressure making her ears hurt deep inside at the corners of her jaw. This wasn’t going to work.
The minivan zombies had seen her now. She checked on the position of the male coming at her across the parking lot, and beyond it, she saw an old Mustang Fastback.
It looked a lot like hers. It was the right year, or appeared to be. It had the side markers in back so it was at least a ’68. But she couldn’t tell what color it was. The discovery threw her concentration off, and she gasped, and the column of fuel fell back down the inside of the hose and she had lost her chance to get the siphon working.
Now she had another problem, as well: She couldn’t leave this parking lot without checking that car. She had to know.
Danny didn’t have a plan anymore. She threw herself across the hood of the Jaguar, raising a cloud of dust, and landed almost on top of a corpse on the other side. It didn’t react. It was dead matter. But a foul, choking stench hissed out of it, obliterating the stink of gasoline.
Danny saw the zombies around her—there were six of them—become confused. She didn’t know how else to identify their behavior. They looked around as if blinded, and they moaned out of sync with each other. They lost the forward impetus that had carried them toward her.
Danny felt an urgent need to vomit. The stink of the corpse she had stamped on was so intense it was like a smoke her lungs couldn’t pull down. She retched once, then ran at the male zombie. It sensed her at last, and raised its arms. Danny rammed the butt of the shotgun into its face, but didn’t pause to deliver the killing blow. She kept moving, and a dozen strides later the Mustang was right in front of her.
Its color was impossible to guess under the dust—dark, was all she could tell. Danny rushed forward and reached out, ignoring the zombies that now surged stiff-legged after her, and the half-dozen others that were spilling through the entrance of the parking lot. She ran her fingers across the dust, and crimson streaks were left behind, so red and wet she checked her fingers to see if she was bleeding.
It was not blood. It was Candyapple Red paint.
Danny turned around and fired the shotgun into the nearest mass of zombies. She didn’t aim. It tore a glistening black swath through the dusty bodies. They swayed backward and kept coming. Danny reached out again and grasped the door handle. Depressed the button. It wasn’t locked. There was a good, solid Detroit
click
and the door was open.
Danny flung herself inside the car. It was a furnace-hot twilight in there, the dust on the windows cutting half the sunlight. There was no view out, except through the driver’s side window where the dust had fallen away when Danny slammed the door. The zombies were five yards from the car. She slapped down the door lock buttons and gasped for breath, supernovas bursting behind her eyes. She had scarcely drawn breath since her boot sank into the corpse. Then she looked around to ascertain the thing of which she was already sure.
This particular ’68 interior was black on black. Totally stock. There was the thin-rimmed, two-spoke steering wheel with its seven decorative medallions. The crooked chrome shifter on the carpeted transmission hump. The five round instruments in the sleek wood-grain dashboard.
Breathe, Danny
.
Tucked under the chrome strip along the lower face of the dash, a receipt for gas from Riverton Junction Texico.
On the passenger seat was the leather jacket Danny had left in the car the last time she drove it.
As impossible as she’d begun to think it was, she was sitting inside her own beloved Mustang.
With the paroxysm of relief came the stark realization that the trail had run cold. She’d found the car, but she hadn’t found Kelley.
She turned her eyes on the zombies. They were anonymous in death, slack-skinned and characterless and cement-white with dust except for the wet punctures of their eyes. Danny saw that these had been secreting snot from their tear ducts; there were dark, gelatinous strings running down their cheeks from the eyes, like beached sea turtles.
None of these zombies looked like Kelley. But there were thousands
lying in the streets of this town. Danny saw into a future like a madman’s vision of hell, in which she had to search every decaying face—and even then, she would not know. How many more of these things had wandered cross-country? How many dead were lying in the brush, the ravines, the sewers? How many turned to ash in the fires? There was so little chance of finding her sister.
But you found the Mustang
.
For once, Danny agreed with the voice. But with the knowledge that she had reached her first impossible goal came terrible responsibility. There was so much more to do, and now she was trapped inside a car, surrounded by hundreds of ravenous walking dead.
She didn’t have the ignition key.
Again Danny felt that sensation of tipping over the edge, of the great wheel of life turning beneath her feet, of staring into the void. Kelley had put the gas receipt right where Danny always put them. The car was in perfect order. It was ready to go, requiring only the key to bring it to life.
Danny realized, with a dismal feeling, that she would have to jump-start the vehicle. As a cop, she could jump-start a bicycle, but she wasn’t fast at it. The process might take longer than she had to live. The undead were right outside, separated only by a sheet of glass.
Then again, Kelley might have been observing Danny’s strict discipline regarding the vehicle, even after she stole it from the driveway. She’d even tucked the gas receipt right where Danny put them herself.
If
Kelley observed Danny’s habits with the Mustang to the letter, it was possible she would yet save Danny’s life. The zombies were on the car now, their hands and faces making smears in the dust on the windshield, clearing patches that looked onto the nightmare outside. Thumping on the roof, clawing at the windows. Danny could smell them in the fetid air. One of the things dragged peeling lips across the windshield, its graphite-colored tongue thrusting against the glass, teeth scraping. It was like the view from a coffin being dug up by cannibals. Right now would be an excellent time for a drink, an excellent time for a long, burning swallow of something strong, but there wasn’t one to be had. Danny was either sitting in her own tomb, or—