Danny grunted and walked down the hall. An hour later she was clean, the remains of her uniform were in an industrial laundry in the commandeered hotel basement next door (the hotel rooms were obviously reserved for the Hawkstone paramilitary elite, with lesser folks crashing wherever there was cover), and Danny was wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt that had
Datacon 2006
written across the chest.
Mitchell was gone, presumably back to his post. Danny didn’t know if Yanaba was still in the designated cubicle, because she didn’t bother going back to it. She’d brought nothing with her but the uniform. The Mustang with her accumulated gear inside was hidden a mile from the marina from which she had embarked on her coastal voyage.
Danny found herself patrolling the building, looking at it from a security standpoint: it was a piss-poor place to be when the zeros broke through the front lines, as Danny had no doubt they would. Huge walls of glass, fire doors and blind alleys, little stairways leading up the outside of the structure onto the roof, where there was an employee patio and some highly insecure plate-glass doors. It was fine security against intelligent human beings, but Danny had seen the flesh-eaters push their way through a wall of glass back in Forest Peak. She knew the only deterrent for them was sheer structural resistance.
Still, this was a temporary arrangement. She didn’t have to put up with it for long.
A man in a window cleaner’s coveralls approached Danny as the sun was going down behind the smoke, casting the city in bronze. He was lean and tough and his eyes never stopped checking the environment around him. Either ex-military or a street person, Danny thought.
Or both, like you and Wulf
, the head-voice added. His cheeks were caved in and strapped with creases. He looked old. He was not as old as he looked.
“You’re Sheriff Adelman, right?” he said. Danny nodded. “You match the description. I’m Kaufman. Welcome to Oz.”
Danny followed him down to the lobby. Across the plaza outside, a convoy of minivans and a Jeep was idling at the curb. “All able-bodied personnel take a shift on security,” Kaufman said. “And they put you top of the list. You look like you know what you’re doing,” he added, with an appraising glance at Danny. They exited the lobby.
Men and women were hunched inside the vehicles, a capacity crowd. Rifles and shotguns bristled between their knees. Kaufman kept up a steady
patter on the way to the street: It wasn’t idle chat. He had information to convey as they crossed the plaza.
“We go out in teams of five, one per vehicle. We have maps. Designated blocks. Each team takes its block and we put a man on every side of the block, with one man patrolling clockwise around it. We radio in after every rotation, and we switch off who’s doing the walking. Everybody gets some exercise. There are supposed to be shooters on the roofs all around, so if you call in a problem, the shooter goes to the nearest vantage point and covers your ass until backup shows up. If there’s no shooter in your position you deal with it. Tell you the truth there won’t be a shooter. Anybody that can shoot gets recruited by those Hawkstone vigilantes.”
“Why don’t they patrol, too?” Danny asked, as they approached the vehicles. “They have the best gear. They have those Bradleys. They have the training.”
Kaufman made a noise of contempt in his throat.
“Those pricks don’t do shit. They’re in charge, and nobody else. They have some kind of agenda, and we’re trying to figure out what the fuck it is. So-called leadership is shitting a brick up there in the Pyramid.”
“I met the senator today,” Danny said.
“She say anything useful?”
“She doesn’t know shit,” Danny said.
“So to put things in perspective, you went up to the thirty-third floor, am I right?” Kaufman said. “To meet the highest-ranking civilian in town. And yet—the Pyramid is forty-eight floors, you know. Those Hawkstone
Shutzstaffel
have the top.”
They climbed into a liver-colored Astrovan and Kaufman slid the door shut behind them. Somebody in the backseat passed Danny a deer rifle and a utility knife. The man in the passenger seat handed her one of those solidstate flashlights that are supposed to last a lifetime but get lost in a couple of months.
“Welcome to the zone,” the man said, and turned around to look out the windshield as they rolled toward the perimeter.
Danny marched with the rest, shining the weak flashlight into every shadow, every angle in the architecture. Kaufman said the entire area had been cleared of zeros. When was the last time they checked? Although the street was empty, there were hundreds of people huddled indoors. Apparently minimum occupancy was ten to a room, at this point. The office building
with its three-to-a-cubicle population represented elite status. There were no lights inside the windows, no voices, no music drifting out. There was a whiff of human excrement in the air, even outside, even with the stench of the fires. Indoors must have been unbearable.
The curfew under which these people were living was even harsher than the lockdowns in Iraq that Danny had participated in. Because of the zombies. Absolute silence, absolute darkness was required. Hide like rabbits, day and night. It was a stupid arrangement, Danny thought. All this manpower locked up and doing nothing. They needed to make downtown into a fortress, not a prison. They needed something to do. They needed to participate in their own defense. It could only be a matter of time, and not much of that, before the zeros got through. Then all these buildings crammed with people would become enormous meat lockers.
It was three in the morning and Danny had made two circuits around the block, besides standing guard on east and south sides while others in her team did the patrolling. Now and then she would see the flicker of a candle or flashlight in one of the windows of the apartment buildings of which her territory was comprised. There was no power for the street lights, but the fires half a mile away cast a red glow over everything, reflected in the clouds of smoke. No stars, no moon. The smoke obscured everything. Shadows seemed deeper and darker, tinged a velvety purple. The street-level frontages were shops, mostly; Danny could see vague shapes of people inside, sleeping in rows on the floor between the display racks and merchandise. Danny could not imagine sleeping in such an exposed situation. Then again, she didn’t sleep much anyway.
With nothing to do but stand guard or walk the block, her thoughts circled around in the same way, always returning to the same points, searching for an analysis that would suggest her next line of action. She wasn’t drinking, so her mind was clear. This was not an advantage. It meant she couldn’t stifle the thoughts that swarmed like bats and distracted her from her reasoning. She considered the strange interview with the senator. Paranoid? Sheltered? What the hell had it all meant? Danny felt as if she’d been brought in mainly to give Senator Anka a distraction, not to offer information.
The politician might have been famous, and she might once have been powerful, but right now she was more like some kind of sideshow. At least that’s how it seemed to Danny. She remembered how the woman had reacted when Danny observed that the helicopter didn’t have a roof to land
on in her building. It must have been what the mercenaries promised her: Keep up the good work, act like a leader, and when the city falls beneath the teeth of the undead, we’ll give you a lift in our helicopter. Only you’ll have to brave the zeros swarming the streets if you want to
get
to the helicopter, because we put you in a pointed building with no landing place on top.
The weird thing was, anybody could have figured it out. Danny was pretty sure everyone but Anka already knew it. The Great Woman was so sheltered she had stopped thinking for herself. Or she actually believed she was going to be safe in her tower indefinitely.
How did this affect Danny’s plans? It meant there was no working government, not in California, not (if the senator was right) in America. There was no organized resistance. So moving forward, Danny was going to have to work with the next-biggest bully. That probably meant Hawkstone right now, and after that, whatever military units coordinated a defense and started taking command. The only problem was, she hated the mercenary system and all the assholes in it. She had dealt with men like that during her tours of duty. They were sociopath cowboys, overpaid and undertrained. Ex-military men or ex-cops, mostly. Addicted to fast money, adrenaline, testosterone, gunpowder, and usually crank. Now they were doubly amped up because they were in danger at home, not in some desert on the ass-end of the world.
So the first line of reckoning was what to do about staying out of human-generated trouble until she found Kelley. The second issue to think about was how to accomplish the task itself.
Kelley was either somewhere, or she was dead. America was a big place, zombies or no zombies. In the days since Kelley left her note and fled the Adelman household, she could have gotten to the East Coast, Alaska, Panama, or for that matter anywhere in the world, if she bought a plane ticket. And if the world hadn’t chosen that particular moment to end.
As it was, Danny knew that Kelley had not taken the Mustang any farther than Potter. For some reason, she’d put the keys up under the sun visor and walked away. That suggested (if she hadn’t just walked away to take a bathroom break, and never returned) that Kelley either met her boyfriend, presumably Barry Davis, with the plan of taking his ride the rest of the way to their destination, or they were meeting up with the intention of taking a train in Potter. But Danny didn’t have the crucial timeline of events. It was also possible the two of them got that far when the crisis broke out, the
mercenaries gunned them down, and Danny had missed seeing Kelley’s rotting corpse in the mountain of them dumped by the railroad tracks. Maybe she had walked away from the car at gunpoint.
Danny worked the problem from every angle, fitting her meager store of facts together on all sides, at every angle, trying to find a match. Nothing so far. Did her jacket on the passenger seat of the Mustang mean Kelley had traveled alone? Did Kelley wear it out of the house and leave it behind? Did it matter? Danny didn’t even know what was relevant. Maybe Kelley drove the car to Potter, set off on foot, and was halfway to Nevada with a backpack full of trail mix, completely unaware of the disaster. Maybe Kelley died back in Riverton, where Danny met Topper and Ernie. Somebody killed her and jumped into the gassed-up Mustang and drove to Potter because it was the next big place to go. There were too many possible outcomes. All of them included the random chance of being savaged by an undead cannibal.
It was all too much. Danny walked the beat and thought and argued with herself and came up with nothing.
There was another issue that claimed her attention, the concern that hung over all the rest: Kelley or no Kelley, what next?
It was
not
too much to say that the end of the world had arrived. Not the comic-book End Times as described by the evangelicals, a great big biblical special-effects extravaganza with asteroids and hellfire and Death on a Pale Horse: There was no righteous Creator overseeing this crisis. No mercy, no meaning, and there were no chosen people. People of every faith, atheists, sinners, and saints, they were all among the reanimated dead walking the earth, in search of flesh to tear from the limbs of the living. The end of the world was here, and as always—like all the rest of the end-of-the-world calamities mankind had survived—it was up to the unimaginative, fighting, enduring types, like Danny (for so she considered herself), to pick up the pieces and carry on. The ones that got wiped out were the interesting people.
So what next? Was it going to be six months of waiting for the zeros to rot off their own bones, to decay until they could no longer attack? Or did the living flesh they consumed keep them going, arrest the processes of death? For all Danny knew, they were now immortal unless destroyed. The chef in the hotel kitchen back in Potter had huge, stinking stains under his arms and at his crotch. Was that rotten sweat and shit, or was he starting to decompose?
Jesus
, Danny thought.
Even to think this stuff is insane. Now I’m making plans around it
.
But there had to be something beyond the current mission. A bigger game plan. Danny could only think of two ideas. The first was obvious. Find a cure, an antidote. Something to wipe the zombies out. Something to stop the virus, to immunize the living against infection. That wasn’t something she could do, of course. But she could help others to do it. Senator Anka had said there were scientists working on it, right here in the city.
Danny didn’t think they would be doing it there much longer: Even with the distant boom of the fires, she could hear moaning out there in the night. It was only a matter of time before the defenses fell; she herself was going to be as far from the city as possible when that moment arrived, regardless of what anybody else had in mind.
Another option wasn’t obvious to Danny at all, because it went against the way she thought and acted. But there wasn’t anything else viable to do. Get back to her little tribe of people at Boscombe Field, maybe pick up some others along the way, and find a safe place to wait out the storm. Live off the land. Hunt and grow seeds into crops. Hell, Amy could raise rabbits and pigs and horses and maybe Danny could eventually convince her to let them eat a few. Danny had a good cross-section of talents among them: Topper and Ernie knew machines. They could work metal. They could handle tools as well as weapons.
Troy knew what to do in an emergency. In his way he was as capable as Danny herself, if not as seasoned by adverse experience. Wulf was a hunter, a tracker. A survivor. Amy was also a doctor, if they needed one. The Mexican woman, Maria, was a born accomplisher, somebody who did things without being asked and didn’t stop until a thing was done. Patrick could remind them not to descend into barbarism. There was the quiet baby and blue-haired Michelle and her brother Jimmy James, who represented the future.