Rise Again (34 page)

Sweating profusely, Danny reached up and flipped down the driver’s side sun visor.

The keys dropped into her lap.

Some part of Danny had curled up and gone to sleep, but the rest of her remained in constant motion, methodical and focused on the one and only task besides brute survival. For this she didn’t need a working hypothesis, she only needed a pen.

She was drawing lines over every route she covered on the map, with scribbled notes wherever there was a town:
Culper, 350, NL, NK, food, drugs, hdwr, Z
. This was the name of the town, the population, NL for “no life,” NK for no sign of Kelley. Then what stores in town might be useful. And finally, Z for zombies.

Danny had left the police interceptor by the side of the road outside Potter, taking the time to push it onto the scenic overlook and cover it with a blue plastic tarp she’d found outside town. She weighted the tarp down with rocks and guessed that inside a few days it would be so dusty as to become invisible. If somebody got into the vehicle and vandalized it, no worries. She had her pick of thousands, out there in the world.

She kept the Mustang’s police-band radio on at all times now, the glove box door hanging open to expose the faceplate and microphone of the miniature detective-style unit that was Danny’s only concession to modifying the otherwise factory stock car. Things were happening in the world outside her remote desert beat. There were a lot of survivors out there.

Danny heard someone on the radio speculate that half of the population
was still alive. So 150 million Americans, more or less. But according to the voices in the ether, they were engaged in costly battles with the zombies for possession of the cities, trying to clear out densely concentrated areas such as Chicago, Manhattan, and Miami. Denver was an inferno, as were San Diego, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Part of San Francisco was on fire. Hundreds of smaller towns were burning.

Much of humanity, it seemed, had banded back together in large groups. That was an ancient survival strategy, of course, and mankind was returning to basics. It made no sense to Danny. For most people, having someone on your flank, even if that person didn’t know shit about survival, was a comfort. For herself, and probably a lot of ex-warriors, it was better to be alone. Better to trust your own reflexes than to put your hope in some civilian with an undeveloped sixth sense that thought you could ever relax, even for one minute, and didn’t know how to properly clear a building. And sometimes, even a seasoned partner could be dangerous—you never want to be the slowest contestant in a foot race against the Devil. Danny was glad to be solo.

It had been two days since she had seen another living human being. She listened to voices on the radio, some of which she was starting to recognize, but it wasn’t the same as company. She never spoke back to them. She didn’t want to get into arguments about joining a bunch of idiots calling themselves “Wolverines,” “Rebel Alliance,” or “Ghostbusters.” Most of all, these bands of survivors were sloppy. Every few hours, somebody somewhere would radio in for help because somebody else was bitten, or missing, or they were surrounded. And then the other groups would fall silent for a while, because in the end, even if they were playing at being soldiers, they were merely informal bands of people trying to survive.

A variety of survival tactics had been adopted, with mixed success. Those that adopted a fortress approach did well at first; they were usually near the big population centers where the zombies were thickest. But supplies were running out.

There were others that kept moving, the way Danny had wanted to do with her own convoy out of Forest Peak. But everybody was reliving
The Road Warrior
now that they knew the infrastructure was gone. Gangs were forming, casual alliances of hard-asses looking not only to survive, but to prosper. They were looting, they were raiding encampments, they were raping and killing. Danny knew her tribe back at Boscombe Field wouldn’t last half an hour against these marauders.

There was something else, but Danny assumed it wasn’t significant: A couple of groups had said they found help. Both of them dropped out of radio contact immediately afterward. Danny wondered what kind of help they had found. She didn’t intend to find out. For once, Danny was placing a high price on her own life: Without it, she could never find Kelley. Still, there was a foul twist in her gut when she heard those Mayday calls on the radio and maintained her own silence. She was the Sheriff of Nowhere.

The last of the supplies Danny laid in was a case of bourbon.

Danny drank her way northward, drawing lines on her map.

Long before she could see the city, Danny could smell the smoke, and then Danny saw the thick sooty band along the horizon, and then she was chugging along the built-up waterfront toward San Francisco. The air stank of smoke and decomposition. The city was on fire. But it was not burning where she was going.

Danny had stopped at a deserted little beachfront hamlet, hardly a town, about ten miles south of San Francisco. All the seaworthy boats in the place were gone, but she had found an unwieldy, twelve-foot Jon boat, too big to row, with the engine removed for servicing. Danny found a clamp-on outboard in a crate at the marina’s machine shop. She was fairly sure she had attached it wrong, but the propeller reached into the water and the gas line flowed okay, so she fired the motor up and aimed the craft north.

She brought the fishing boat into a notch at the throat of Pier 45, which a large Victorian-style signboard proclaimed to be Fisherman’s Wharf. The pier was defended by a bow-shaped breakwater of concrete. In modern times it had become a parking spot for privately owned pleasure craft and charter boats. As Danny had discovered elsewhere during her two-day journey along the coast, everything on the water with sails or an engine had long since been piloted away; the water was the only safe route out of the city. God only knew what had happened to all the boat people. Maybe they starved. Maybe they were all in a fleet, headed for Hawaii to start a new society based on peace and understanding.

Danny was surprised at the small scale of the pier’s marina. Fewer than a hundred slips. In San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, there were tens of thousands of places to keep a boat. Here in San Francisco these few precious slips were open for the taking for probably the first time in memory—not a rowing dinghy remained. The water was deep and mysterious and thick with effluent from the city. Not just ordinary urban flotsam, but oily sludge, ashes, and charred refuse, the drainage of a vast wound. Bags and backpacks bobbed in the tide. Shoes and shirts. Toys. A human head drifted past, mouth sagging into the water as if to drink the sea. The water stank so badly she could taste the smell.

Danny nosed the boat toward a makeshift barbed-wire fence that lined Jefferson Street at the water’s edge, where several men in improvised commando costumes stood with weapons raised. They were armed with shotguns and rifles and looked as if killing was little more than expediency now, stripped of meaning. Danny knew the look well. She was wearing it herself.

“Don’t shoot yet,” the one man without a long gun said. He carried a pistol, and he appeared to be in charge, based upon his irritated expression.

“It’s a zero,” one of the others said, a young man in a black beret. “Look at it.”

“Zeros can’t drive a boat,” the man in charge said.

“It’s a zero,” a black man said. He had white in his hair, or ashes. Danny could not tell at this distance. All of the men had some kind of white cream smeared beneath their noses.

“What’s a zero?” she called, killing the engine. Her voice relaxed their trigger fingers a little. They did not respond. The boat ground up against the concrete a few moments later. At a gesture from the man in charge, the others stepped through a gap in the fence and Danny was hauled up by her arms onto the pier.

The silence was filled with questions. Back here among the living, Danny realized, she knew nothing. Half a dozen pairs of eyes with complex, working brains behind them, not just dead nerves and teeth. She would have to relearn how to interact, and what was going on, and who was in charge. It wouldn’t be her for a while. She would have to play along. She would have to remember to fear a gun in the hands of an amateur.

Right now she was too tired to care. They were pathetic, these men. Like the hunters that came from the city to shoot deer up in Forest Peak, barely capable of not shooting themselves, let alone bagging game. That
these people were salty after a few days of mass murder didn’t make them soldiers.

“You bit?” the man in charge said to Danny.

“No.”

“You look bit.”

“Fuck you, cocksucker,” Danny exclaimed, forgetting her nonconfrontational strategy.

“I’m Mitchell Gold,” the man in charge said. “This is my part of the perimeter.” He drew a compact satellite transmitter from his back belt and spoke into it. Danny thought she would very much like one of those radios. She would like some technological edge. A clue. Anything.

“Danny Adelman,” Danny said. “I’m a sheriff from down near Los Angeles.”

“Long way,” Mitchell said.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of dead walking around,” Danny said. She spat on the ground but the taste of smoke remained in her mouth. “It’s zeros, huh?” she continued. “The zombies.”

“That’s the official designation,” the black man said. “Zeros. Stupid fucking name because you can’t say a number with a zero in it without everybody flips out. You gotta say ‘naught,’ which I for one never fucking remember.”

The conversation was interrupted by the gurgle of the Chinese engine turning over. It was Beret Boy: He’d climbed down into the boat and fired her up. He was holding his shotgun on his companions. The men who had been silent so far raised their guns in his direction but looked at Mitchell.

“Don’t try to stop me. I’m going,” Beret Boy said.

“Needledick,” the black man muttered.

“Fuck it, let him go,” said Mitchell. “He can’t shoot worth a damn anyway.”

They watched the boat lurch backward out of the mooring into which Danny had eased it. The kid knew nothing about handling watercraft. He crashed the hull of the boat against a bollard in the pier, knocking himself into the scuppers. The shotgun flew overboard. The engine quit. The boy got back to his feet, restarted the engine after several gargling attempts, then spun the wheel and got the boat pointed out to sea. A couple of civilians who had been working their way among the buildings on the pier charged at the boat; the male hurled himself into the water and began to swim after it with flailing strokes, but the boat was already well out of reach. Danny lost interest.

“Take me to your leader,” she said, without any ironic intent.

“Somebody go take them into custody,” Mitchell said, waving his pistol down the pier at the civilians. He drew a tube of Vicks Vapo Rub from his shirt pocket. “Put this under your nose, it cuts the smell.” Danny took this for a goodwill gesture. But Mitchell had an eager look on his face. It wasn’t simply a friendly gesture. He wanted something. “So,” he said, aiming at nonchalance, “you got any news from down south?”

This was obviously the magic question, based on the nearly comical expression of expectation Mitchell wore. The answer was worth more than a squeeze of nose ointment.

So Danny said “yes,” and within minutes she was in a dusty Cadillac sport utility vehicle with dried blood splashed all over the headliner, cruising into the city.

The smoke rose up among the hills beyond downtown, a boiling black curtain behind the sunlit buildings with their optimistic geometrical shapes in the financial center. Daly City was engulfed in fire, Danny assumed, and the entire South City area. They were thoroughly cut off from the mainland. If you could swim a couple of miles over to Sausalito, you could get away. If Sausalito wasn’t infested. Otherwise, the population of downtown San Francisco, diminished as it might be, was trapped.

The light was amber-colored and dim from the smoke, the illusion of a sunset lasting all day. The air stank. Streets were mostly clear of debris, but the sidewalks were crowded with wrecked vehicles and twisted bicycle frames. Bulldozers stood idle at some intersections. Traffic lights were dark. There were burnt areas on the pavement and dark stains of blood or oil. Broken plate glass. A Starbucks with a Ford Taurus hanging out of the window. A fire hydrant, broken off pavement-high like a tooth at the gum line, spurted water into the air; nobody paid it any attention. It might have been like that for days. A river ran from the stump of the hydrant downhill toward the bay. Here there were none of the tumbled corpses Danny had come to see as part of the landscape, the ones that were not coming back. The place had been swept of the worst.

They drove past Telegraph Hill, and Danny heard sporadic gunfire from up there. Sharpshooters on Coit Tower, maybe. Or executions. There was a distinct feeling of martial law in the absence of people on the street; she saw pallid, grimy faces at windows, and knots of armed men and women patrolling around their little fiefdoms of a single city block. Lots of those good
military satellite radios. A couple of pickup trucks loaded with canned goods cruised past with rifle-toting escorts atop the loads.