Others had value, too. Danny didn’t really know them. Some of the faces she could only barely conjure in her mind. She’d been away from them as long as she’d been with them, now. They were all a resource to be used for survival. Not only a resource, though—it didn’t sit right in Danny’s mind to think of them that way, although that was her first instinct. More than that, they were her people. They were in this thing with her. And once she admitted that, she knew she had let them down. She had put her personal crusade first, when none of them had done the same. They all had families, loved ones, friends. Were they any less sisters or brothers than Danny?
The answer to that question hurt. They were
more
so than Danny.
That’s why she had left them behind to search for her sister: To Kelley, she was less family, less loved one, less friend. The farewell note was engraved in her memory, verbatim. It ached unbearably, cut into her soul one word at a time. Now, just a few days too late, she was trying to make amends to the sister she’d let down for most of her life. But in doing so, she had let the others down, abandoned them.
Danny was grappling with ideas of a kind she’d never had to deal with before. It scared her. This was the stuff she’d been running from all her life, and if she stopped running now, it would mean she’d been wrong all those years. Her motto had always been
I can handle this
. If she fell back on a bunch of incompetent civilians, she wasn’t stronger. She was weaker.
What she’d never considered was the idea that “stronger” wasn’t the only virtue. There were other things. Being a good friend, maybe. Not only being close to people, but
needing
them. She’d always thought of that as a weakness, but it was also a strength.
And Kelley—what did Danny even need her for? Maybe hope. Maybe atonement. Maybe she simply loved her, and that was all there was to it.
Soon she would have to go back. This whole junket to San Francisco was a terrible sidetrack, and now she was hooked into some kind of poorly run, counterproductive system even less effective than the theaters of war she’d been in overseas.
This is getting to be a habit with me
, she thought.
Seeking out disasters to be part of
. Like she had to find situations where her somewhat brutal talents would be needed. Danny knew, down inside herself where she seldom ventured to explore, that something had now changed. Even if Amy and all the others didn’t need her, and were prospering at the airfield, the fact remained: She needed them.
The dawn after Danny slipped away in the night, it was Maria who discovered her absence.
Maria was up early, as was her habit. The sun was below the horizon, washing the sky behind the mountains with pale pastel colors. Maria had been sleeping on a folding cot by the radio. Now she said a brief prayer to
the God she wasn’t so sure she understood anymore. Then she went downstairs and looked into the office, where she saw the empty couch with a blanket rumpled up on it. The red-haired
renegada
sheriff lady wasn’t in there. Not surprising: She hardly ever slept. Probably patrolling the fence.
Maria went outside into the cool, dewy air and breathed in the freshness of it before the sun could rise and bake it dry. On her way back into the tower, she saw a piece of paper, folded double and taped to the glass door. She hadn’t noticed it on the way out. The paper had “
FOR AMY
” written on it in big block letters. Maria opened it, and read:
Amy: Keep them here. Back with Kelley
.
Danny
.
Maria knew who Kelley was, because Amy had told her about Danny’s personal troubles, and the long, bitter note Kelley had written. But at first Maria didn’t understand. Keep who here? Herself and the others? Did Danny know where Kelley
was
? How long would it take to get her, a day? A week?
Before she even knew she was on the move, Maria found herself shaking Amy awake in the dormitory of the terminal. Amy drifted up from an exhausted sleep, eyes rolling, mumbling. Some of the others woke up; the boy Jimmy James sat up in his top bunk and watched them with wary eyes that looked too old for his face. Maria thrust the note into Amy’s hands.
“Scrambled, with rye toast, dry,” Amy said, and blinked, and looked at Maria’s tense face. Then the note. She woke up in a hurry.
“God
darnit
, Danny,” she said. “You big
dumbhead
.”
It was time to prepare for a long stay at the airfield. Amy didn’t know how long they would need to remain there, and she didn’t know how long Danny would be gone—if she even planned to return. Amy swore Maria to silence regarding the contents of the note; it wasn’t that the note itself contained anything incriminating, but rather that it contained so little.
She called a general meeting and told the others that Danny was on a mission, and there was nothing to worry about. “I think you all know by now she’s a lone wolf type,” Amy said, “and she always comes back. She’ll probably bring the cavalry with her.”
Nobody seemed to be worried. Except Patrick, but he didn’t say anything. He could read Amy. That made her nervous. She knew herself to be
highly legible, to the right person. The boy Jimmy James was another one. He knew something was up. But he also kept his silence, although that was more due to his nature than to an awareness of a need for discretion. So Amy bluffed her way through it, some twenty or twenty-five faces turned in her direction looking as if they believed her and were interested in what she had to say, to varying degrees.
“These jobs are things Danny suggested to me,” Amy lied, “things we can do while she’s gone. She says they’re, um, vital efforts to ensure our, um, long-term viability. In those words pretty much.”
“Sheriff don’t want to do the manual labor,” Topper complained.
Think anything you want
, was Amy’s fervent wish.
Just don’t think too hard
.
The first project she’d come up with was a simple matter of efficiency. The airfield had a finite supply of water, and so far they had used it with abandon. Now it was time to start conserving the stuff. That meant arranging some long-drop toilet facilities. At seven gallons a flush, they needed to start crapping in a hole. There was a general groan of dismay at this, but these people were all from the Southland. They knew about water shortages. Simon the accountant raised his hand: “I guess we can’t wash the driveway with a hose, either,” he said. That got a laugh. Mostly from Amy, who was on the verge of hysteria.
Amy gave Topper and Ernie the task of figuring out where the drainpipes went, and diverting the bathing and washing water so it could be collected. She wasn’t sure what they were collecting it for, but that’s what they seemed to do in the magazine articles on resource conservation she never quite got around to properly reading. Maybe they could grow their own corn with it, someday. Primarily it was an unpleasant, demanding job that would keep the restless bikers occupied for a couple of days. That was something Danny had explained to Amy a while back: Leadership is the act of causing other people to invest themselves in difficult work. You can’t go easy on people and lead them at the same time. If you go easy on them, they will either self-destruct or find a different leader.
Human nature
, Danny would say.
Fucking ridiculous
. And then she’d pour herself another shot.
Leadership didn’t come naturally to Amy.
People
didn’t come naturally to her. She was going to have to figure it out until Danny got back, assuming she did, assuming she didn’t get all dead and start chomping around. Amy’s plan was simple: Do what Danny would do. Except, of course, the part where she took off and left everybody behind.
The second project was simpler, and Troy Huppert was happy to lead the effort. He took a team of ten people around the entire perimeter fence, looking for places that required reinforcement. Then they set to work building up those weak spots. There weren’t many, but, as Troy said, it only took one.
Those two zombies moved slowly along the fence, hooking their gray fingers through the wire, always trying to get close to the living that were at work on the other side of the mesh. The small girl’s empty sleeve of torn skin swayed as she moved. It was sickening to look at, but nobody went for long without glancing at the undead that yearned to get among them. The consensus was that these two zombies should be dispatched very soon. It was too much to handle, having them watching.
For the remaining people in the assembly, Amy concocted minor jobs: cleaning, stock taking of food and supplies, simple maintenance. Patrick was in charge of this cluster of tasks, and obviously grateful for something to do. They might be here another couple of days, or it might be six months. Amy wanted to proceed under the latter assumption. That meant knowing exactly what they had to work with, and taking care of it. This didn’t require visualizing what Danny would do: As a country veterinarian, Amy knew all about conservation and maintenance of supplies. Her business lived by the careful shepherding of expensive materials for as long as they would last, juggling availability with expiration dates.
Maria stayed up in the tower with the radio. Ernie posted watch. Amy realized there was only one person who didn’t know what to do that day: herself.
After a brief inspection of Topper and Ernie’s trench-digging efforts, which had yielded several lengths of old rust-furred iron pipe, Amy decided she might be well employed watching the road for any sign of Danny’s return. So she sat herself on the bumper of one of the minnows, a pickup truck with a fiberglass cap, and kept her eye on the ribbon of asphalt that wiggled away through the scrub desert.
She sat there for half an hour before she realized she could see something approaching. It was a cloud of dust. At first she thought it was a dust devil, one of those tiny cyclones that whirled up off the sand and threw litter around before blowing itself out.
But this one didn’t blow out. It grew.
Eventually Amy could see the dark ciphers of vehicles emerging from the horizon, growing as they approached. Three or four of them. Then Amy found Wulf at her elbow. He was also watching, his rumpled eyes squinting into the hard light.
“I guess we shouldn’t have counted on staying alone out here,” Amy said.
“Military,” Wulf said.
“You can’t tell that from here.”
“They’re spaced out perfect. Hundred meters each. It’s a convoy.
Xin chao
, Doc. I’m outta here,” he said, and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He shambled over to the nearest hangar and emerged a few moments later with a child’s nylon backpack. It had a unicorn embroidered on it.
“You’ve been waiting for this,” Amy protested. “You’re just like Danny. You can’t wait to let everybody down.”
“Didn’t make no fuckin’ promises to nobody,” Wulf muttered. “Keys.”
Amy had the key to the new padlock that held the gates shut. She let Wulf out without further discussion, knowing there was none to be had. He really was a lot like Danny, obstinate and alone. Wulf didn’t walk down the road, but disappeared with surprising speed into the rutted landscape uphill of the airfield. Amy felt a little tickle of fear in the back of her belly. Those vehicles approaching represented change. A new situation. Amy was sick of new situations. At the time she wouldn’t have thought of this as a premonition. Later, she would describe it exactly that way.
There were three vehicles, a pair of military Humvees with the deep, buttressed suspensions that gave them impossible ground clearance; both had .50 caliber machine guns mounted on the roofs. Behind them was a hulking machine that Amy thought looked like a tank on wheels instead of treads, its turret bristling with weapons. All three vehicles were painted in an angular black-and-gray camouflage pattern Amy didn’t remember seeing before. Danny would have recognized it.
The word HAWKSTONE was lettered discreetly on the cab doors of the vehicles, accented with a logo: a simplified eagle’s head over an American flag. Amy guessed this meant they were some kind of private outfit, but for all she knew there was a Hawkstone branch of the Marines or something. Big Red One, Screaming Eagles, and all that fierce-sounding stuff Danny was into. A stocky man wearing the same camouflage as the vehicles sprang out of the lead Humvee almost before it stopped moving. He came right up to
the gates and banged on the metal frame with a fancy assault weapon, as if Amy and the half-dozen others now gathered behind the gates couldn’t see him.
“Hi,” Amy said, aware it might sound somewhat lame.
“Open up on the double,” the man said, and waved at his companions in the second Humvee. Two men climbed down from the cargo area in back, carrying a third man between them in a fireman’s lift. The third man’s leg was saturated with blood streaming from the thigh, and he looked pale and ill.
Topper came right up to the gate and squared off in front of the man with the gun. “What’s your business?” he said.
“We got wounded,” the stocky man replied.
“I see that. And you’re waving a gun around.”
“Open the fucking gates,” the man said, and Amy stepped between them and released the padlock.
There was a great bustle of activity as the wounded man was carried into the terminal building and laid out on the Ping-Pong table in the rec room, his head propped up on a greasy old sofa cushion, a hastily stripped bedsheet beneath him. Everyone who wasn’t helping was watching, so it seemed almost incidental that the two Humvees and the big, tanklike vehicle, an M1117 ASV, rolled through the gates and took up prominent positions in the center of the airfield parking lot. Their noses were pointed in an arc outward, tail-to-tail, creating a defensible center and a comprehensive field of fire—but not out at the desert. Inward, toward the airfield.
The new arrivals moved with such purpose that it wasn’t questioned. Patrick returned from the motor home with the big duffel bag of medical supplies they’d accumulated, only to find himself having to ask permission to enter the terminal building from a pair of muscular, uniformed men holding machine guns across their chests.