One of these days, Danny thought, Magnussen would report back to headquarters and announce, “The zeros are dying,” and she would be hailed as the greatest champion the city had ever known. Meanwhile, she would have accomplished what? She might be hoarding money, or jewelry—gold and stones. Government bonds. She might be collecting material for the finest good life possible, scavenging herself into a retirement of luxury and comfort. Or maybe she wanted to be a superstar.
Danny felt hands grip her leg as she swung it over the far side of the wall: strong, fast hands. She recoiled, preparing to kick where the face ought to be, when she heard Magnussen’s low, simmering voice.
“Step down and let’s find some cover,” she said.
Danny was seething. She wanted to break the exotic face of her guide through the wasteland. Smash her with the prybar. Magnussen had left Danny among the zombies without a word of warning, and now everything was supposed to be hunky-dory again. Danny didn’t think so.
“What the fuck was that?” Danny hissed through her teeth.
“There were too many,” Magnussen said. “Why didn’t you follow me?”
Danny realized there was no point demanding explanations.
“I was ahead of you, is why,” she said, and dropped the subject. Their weird partnership was almost done, anyway. Their objective was straight ahead.
A couple hundred feet away, the Army convoy stood on the freeway, among all the vehicles of everyday life abandoned there as well. It looked almost like a freeze-frame of ordinary traffic on a busy day. But this traffic was going to stay right where it was for a long time. The light in the sky was gathering. Sunrise was less than an hour away. The light was sufficient to reveal at least two dozen huddled shapes lying on the pavement among the military vehicles. There were others, as well, scattered as far as they could
see among the civilian vehicles. Both women had doused their lights. No point providing an early warning.
Behind the wall, the wailing of hunger could be heard, but it didn’t seem to have any effect on the zeros littering the freeway. They could be too rotten to move, Danny thought. But they’d been able to feed, of course, so they would be in better shape than the ones on the other side of the wall. That seemed to be a factor. Danny hoped the fast variety wouldn’t be found in this area. They were still close to the epicenter, less than six miles. The smarter ones appeared eighty miles or more from the source. That would explain Magnussen’s cavalier attitude toward the undead, although not her hanging Danny out for bait.
Danny would get herself up into the Cougar and get it out of the way of the flatbed. Then she was going to leave San Francisco behind forever. She kept repeating this idea to herself. Another five minutes, and she was on her way back to Boscombe Field.
“Give me one of your brain picks,” Danny whispered. Magnussen reached back and eased one of the weapons off her belt, careful not to let the Velcro make its unmistakable sound.
The women’s attention was fixed on the flatbed, which was three vehicles from the front in the twenty-vehicle formation, its payload obscured beneath camouflage-printed canvas. It was flanked on both sides by Humvees and utility SUVs, painted in an assortment of green and desert Army camouflage patterns. Several of these had crashed into the passenger vehicles in front of them. Down the road was the massive Cougar MRAP, slewed across lanes just as Magnussen had described. Although Danny and Magnussen had done little to advertise their presence, the shapes of corpses on the roadway were beginning to stir.
Danny’s equilibrium was briefly thrown by the sight of the flatbed truck. The low-slung configuration of the vehicle, which resembled a construction crane tractor with the cab down between the front wheels, indicated it was a purpose-built missile carrier. Danny had seen them many times before. Although the payload was not visible, the only missile system in Danny’s experience that would require a truck so
large
—the trend was always to smaller and smaller tactical missile deployment systems—was a Patriot Transporter/Erector/Launcher unit. A Patriot launcher would hold sixteen missiles in four “cans,” or boxed launch tubes, each missile with a payload sufficient to vaporize a large building. It was far too much firepower for
their purposes. It would be a disaster.
Tough shit
, Danny thought, dismissing her qualms.
It’s a disaster already
.
It was time to move fast.
Danny hustled down the embankment alongside Magnussen, then they separated, Danny running for the Cougar, the Zero Killer cutting straight across lanes to the cab of the flatbed truck. The zombies were struggling to their feet, moaning, some already lurching toward the living prey. They were wrapped in body armor and Kevlar helmets, as Magnussen had said they were. The jaws were free to work. Danny kept clear of them.
The predawn light was at that tricky stage, like moonlight, when it appears to reveal much—but what it conceals is far greater. Any of those shadows could have grasping claws and slicing teeth hidden inside it. So Danny also kept clear of anything she couldn’t see under or around.
This meant her route through the vehicles was sinuous. It took far longer to reach the Cougar than she had anticipated. Some of the stumbling zeros were converging on her target, not because they anticipated her goal, but because they were traveling the shortest route to intersect with her path. Two of them got there first. Both wore the Hawkstone camouflage. Big, once-brawny males. One was bare-headed, with the face skinned off from the bridge of the nose down to the chin. The thing had upper eyelids but none below, eyeballs sagging in a matrix of congealed flesh down onto the exposed cheekbones. The teeth showed in the lipless jaws like a picket fence. The other’s uniform was black with old blood. It was missing the meat off its upper arms; the forearms hung uselessly from the stripped humerus bones, ragged uniform sleeves swaying in shreds from its shoulders. This one wore a helmet.
Behind Danny, three more were lurching toward her position, about ten feet from the driver’s side door of the Cougar. The mutilated pair stood between her and the vehicle. Danny hefted the brain pick in one hand and the prybar in the other.
She decided to do things the bold way. She swung the prybar at the one with no face, shattering its teeth. Her soul recoiled to see the damage done: It was one thing to smash the face in its bag of skin, and another thing to see the teeth shatter and the pieces spill to the ground, with some of them dangling on ropes of nerve tissue from the jaws. She swung again and the hooked cat’s paw at the end of the bar caved in its temple. One of the eyes burst on impact, spurting thin gray liquid. The thing went down.
It was still in action, struggling to get to her, but she’d scrambled its
brain enough for her purpose. The second was protected by the helmet. That made things difficult. Danny had been in the fight for less than ten seconds; the space between her and the zeros behind her was closing by the moment, and she had to get up into the cab of the MRAP, which was not at all like climbing into a Suburban. The tires alone were chest-high on Danny. She had to scale a ladder up the side of the vehicle, then swing the door out above her head. If she opened it wrong, she would fall off the ladder. She had to make this quick and get up there immediately or she was going to get pulled down by the others that were closing in.
The stench of them seemed to fill the air with invisible, rotten jelly, making it difficult to draw breath.
Danny saw she wouldn’t have to pierce the helmet to stop the zombie in front of her. It didn’t have arms. Danny struck it savagely on the knee, the thing fell over sideways, and with three bounding strides she reached the side of the gigantic vehicle. Up the ladder—the latch handle was inset at the bottom of the door. She pulled down on the handle and the pneumatics swung the door open. She grabbed the frame to pull herself up, already aware of how close the half-dozen undead behind her were, and how easy it would be for one of them to tear off a chunk of her calf right now—the smell was mind-blowing. With a thrust of her arms, she lunged up into the cab of the MRAP. The stench hit her first, the swarm of raisin-fat flies next. The reanimated, decaying soldier hit her an instant later.
The thing had been in the cab of the Cougar for a long time. The soldier must have climbed up in there, wounded, and bled to death. When it returned to animation, it was trapped inside, and went into its hibernation state, all the while liquefying in the intense heat of the enclosed vehicle, baking day after day in the sun. That it could still move in its advanced state of decay was testament to the durability of the human design. Ropes of festering meat slid from its limbs, fizzing with bacteria. Its uniform was a sack filled with the liquor of burst guts. The stink of it was beyond endurance.
Danny’s mind shut down. She simply hurled herself away from the thing as it threw its weight against her, snapping its jaws so that the lips tore free and hung like storm-drowned nightcrawlers. Danny flew through the air, five feet down and six feet out, and hit the pavement on her back with such violence that only the pain told her she wasn’t dead. The grenades at her belt slammed into her vital organs and threatened to burst them. Her skull bounced off the asphalt, the knit cap offering no protection, and Danny saw
the universe contract to a pinpoint, but consciousness came back in a fraction of a second—in time for the waves of agony from her back.
A moment later, the rotten thing in the cab of the MRAP fell upon her. It exploded. What seemed to be ten gallons of sewage belched into her face, then bowlfuls of warm rice. Not rice, though. Maggots.
Danny might have screamed. She couldn’t tell. She struggled with stunned senses to get away from the thing, her head whirling from the blow on the pavement. Her body hurt to move, but she had to do something to get away from the nightmare of rotten meat and bones that sprawled across her body.
Beneath her something else was moving. She had fallen on the zero with no arms. Somewhere it was questing with its mouth to find purchase on her body.
The rest of the monsters were reaching down to get their piece of her. Moaning. Snapping their jaws.
Danny got her legs under her. The left one was not holding weight; she fell. She pushed herself away, rolling beneath the Cougar’s powerful, V-shaped undercarriage. She didn’t have anything to lose, and she had very little bandwidth available to think. Mostly she was trying not to pass out. So she reached around for one of the time-delay grenades, pulled the wire with clumsy fingers, and skidded it back the way she had come. Then she crawled as she had in the desert. Her clothes stuck to the pavement, glutinous with corpse ichor, larvae spilling in fistfuls from her hair. Her mouth writhed with them.
Danny dragged her unresponsive leg all the way beneath the vehicle, then into the approaching dawn light on the other side. She curled herself into an aching ball behind the wheel. She wondered how long ten seconds could possibly last. She wondered if the vehicle was equipped with the run-flat tire inserts. If it was, she might live. Otherwise, she was about to get blown in half. She put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes. Her brains were working again.
The grenade went off.
The shockwave threw Danny away from the wheel of the Cougar. She hardly felt it. On both sides of her a haze of shrapnel, organic matter, and fire filled the air; she received none of it in the silhouette of the massive, blast-resistant tire. The vehicle itself hardly rocked on its suspension, although the paint caught fire.
Danny crawled on elbows and knees away from the site of the explosion.
She had no idea if she was the center of interest for a swarm of undead or the only thing moving on that section of road.
She kept crawling, and found she was moving back behind the MRAP. The foremost Humvee was right in front of her. She dragged herself toward it, then took a rest against its side. She didn’t have a whole lot of energy. She spat to clear her mouth, then spat again, and dry heaved. Then she wanted to go to sleep. She couldn’t go on fighting. It was her time. Her fortune in seconds was spent.
But there was something happening around her. The cavalry must have come. She saw people passing among the vehicles. They weren’t zeros. They moved with purpose, hunched over for cover, slipping silent and intent between the cars. Danny supposed she should be pleased. These must be civilians who were holed up in this area, outside the so-called safe zone, and they came out of hiding when they heard the grenade go off. Maybe they would have a working shower, and some whiskey. She didn’t call to the people who were now encircling the blast site. They would find her. She didn’t have the breath in her body.
Then she heard something else. It was cursing. She turned her head slowly, the vertebrae that carried it protesting at the strain. It was the Zero Killer, Magnussen. She was trotting toward the MRAP, enraged, cursing hysterically. And she hadn’t seen Danny.
“Fucking idiot,” Danny heard, and “amateur,” and “asshole cop.” Magnussen efficiently stabbed one of the nearest zeros in the skull, leaving the knife in its head, and reached a brain pick from her belt. The Luger was in her other hand. Danny was almost touched at her devotion to duty: Magnussen was going to move the MRAP herself. Danny wondered why the others who had come out to see what was going on didn’t emerge from hiding to help Magnussen, at least. They were so quiet. They probably figured Danny was dead, or undead.
The sun was a few minutes from rising now. Color was seeping into the world. Birds would be singing, if birds sang anymore. Danny painstakingly rotated her head back around to see what the new folks were doing.
She felt a wave of ice water spill through her veins, the pain of her body overridden by fear.
These weren’t survivors circling around among the vehicles on the freeway. They were undead. And Danny realized what it was they were doing.
They were hunting.
In a pack.
Patrick walked past Ace at the wrong time, or in the wrong way, or Ace just wanted something to do.