Wulf’s toy radio spoke. It stuttered and spat fragments of words. Ernie thumbed his on, as well, and it echoed Wulf’s.
“What band are those on?” Danny asked.
“Fuck if I know,” Ernie said. “Any damn interference cuts ’em out.”
Danny understood. Toy transmitters, like these radios, or remote-controlled cars, were designed to be easily overridden by stronger signals. It was a guarantee that some kid with a foot-long RC dune buggy wouldn’t inadvertently cut out a fire department signal, or a police radio, rendering communications impossible during an emergency. Some devices that were supposed to be safe for use still did it: Certain cordless phones, for example, could break up a transmission as a squad car rolled past the house. As the convoy rolled up the road toward their position, the puny little toy radios were picking up transmissions from the transceivers aboard the vehicles.
The digital band signals would make no sense, of course. The military favored them for that reason, among many. Scrambled fragments of noise that had to be assembled into ones and naughts before a computer turned those into simulations of sounds. But the White Whale didn’t have a satellite radio. It was good old-fashioned Citizen’s Band. That meant Danny might possibly get to listen in. They all watched and waited as the convoy rumbled away from the airfield, a plume of dust rising up behind it. They all listened
as the toy radios muttered and squawked. Then chunks of intelligible speech came through. Words and phrases. And finally Danny heard the word “Potter.” Patrick was right.
“Is that thing gassed up?” Danny asked. “I’d like to take it for a spin.”
Murdo led the convoy down the highway and was relieved to find far fewer zombies once they moved into the rougher hill country. They’d had to grease dozens of the things on the way to the main road, blowing them apart with the cannon or running them down. The massive swarm inching its way north through the lowlands worried him, because Potter was northward. It also worried him, or bothered him, that his men hadn’t given him credit for his courageous actions of the morning. Hadn’t he gotten them out of that place? Hadn’t he been the one who went outside and braved the gunfire? They had no appreciation. When he hooked up with command he was going to request a new unit. These men were insubordinate. They would never stop laughing at him. Murdo understood that now. Never to his face, but the laughter would go on in private. It didn’t matter.
He had a plan, and he was going to make it work. Even if something was wrong at Potter, that was where the supply train had stopped. There would be materiel there. The train was presumably long gone, but the supplies would be there. He knew it because the last transmission they’d gotten from command was ten minutes before the train pulled into Potter. Command had been on the train, along with some fine warmaking equipment and fifty seasoned men.
It was all going to work out.
Amy had seen the zombies surrounding the airfield, how dried-out they looked, and rotten. They couldn’t last much longer. Their tissues would break down and they would collapse and die again, forever this time.
If Murdo and his bunch of meatheaded killers could have been persuaded to pitch in, instead of playing the heavies, they might have been able to hold out at the airfield even longer. They could have mounted some kind of defense. All of them together, the men, the women, the civilians and professional soldiers, might have been able to accomplish something. As it was, all they had achieved was to render the airfield uninhabitable for the next people who came along. Yet another refuge from the undead, lost to stupidity and fear and violent thinking. When Murdo got to Potter, what would he find? More of his idiot companions marching around with their
guns and gung-ho? Would they be driving around shooting up crowds of zombies, as they had done on the way out of the airfield?
She remembered, when the gates swung open, how Reese, now in the driver’s seat of the White Whale, had screamed with excitement. The claws of the zombies had torn at the outside of the motor home, blackened fingers with the bones jutting out of them. The wheels of the heavy machine had spun in the greasy slick of bowels, dirt, and blood on the road. The smoke from the spinning tires stank of grilled meat, a smell that left a taste in the mouth. The survivors were weeping, holding each other. The baby, uncharacteristically, wailed. Then that huge tank thing of Murdo’s had plowed a path through the bodies, and the tires of the Whale had gripped, and they started to advance. They left the airfield behind but the stink remained with them.
Reese and Murdo were talking over the radio. Amy was listening. They all were. The question that hung over them was simple: Why had the mercenaries taken
anybody
with them? Before, it made some kind of sense. They had hostages, in case the menfolk tried something. But all the menfolk had done so far, and Amy was pretty sure this meant only Wulf, was shoot at them from a distance. Murdo made some cryptic remarks, couched in jargon, that sounded like they might refer to the civilians: Mention of “the cargo” and “tiger trap” caught Amy’s attention. But there was nothing specific. All she knew for certain was this wasn’t a humanitarian gesture. They weren’t being saved for the sake of saving them. Danny would have known what they were up to.
Amy grieved for Danny, and on a bigger scale she grieved for the brief possibility that if they all worked together they could make some kind of future out of the disaster that had befallen the world. She didn’t mourn for the murdered world, at least not in any direct sense. It had always been a strange, unforgiving place to her, all those people out there making each other miserable. They were still doing it, alive or dead. What she wanted was the chance to start over. That’s what all this horror and destruction offered: a new start. Typical of human beings not to leap at the chance.
There was a series of curt commands from Murdo, and the convoy rolled to a stop at the intersection of the road to the airport and the Ore Creek Highway. Shoshone Springs, the place was called. Amy assumed this was
because there were no Native Americans and no springs there. But there was something written on the blacktop.
They couldn’t see what it said; the mass of the ASV blocked the view. Flamingo got out of the Humvee and checked the paint. Held his fingers up to show Murdo, leaning out of the ASV’s side door. Wet paint, Amy guessed. A minute later the convoy was rolling again, heading in the direction of Potter. As they drove through the turn, Amy clambered over her miserable companions huddled in the living area, and made it across the bedroom just in time to look out the back window and catch the message written in sprawling, hot-pink spray paint across the intersection:
POTTER = DEATH.
Amy thought it looked like Danny’s handwriting. But Danny, of course, was dead. Amy supposed she would be seeing Danny’s handwriting everywhere for a while, until the memories faded. That is, if she was alive long enough for memories to fade. She might be seeing Danny quite soon, in the most morbid sense of the phrase.
As the motor home hummed down the open road toward whatever unpleasant destiny Murdo had prepared, Amy wished she believed in heaven. It was one of her favorite wishes, although she kept it a secret, even from Danny. She had a very specific vision of the afterlife. It was not white clouds and angels in the sky plucking harps. Amy’s heaven was green fields and forests full of all the animals she’d ever known, and a few people, too. Danny would be there, at age sixteen, before life started beating the joy out of her.
Amy thought of Danny again, probably half-eaten and rotten underneath the Mustang. Danny had a habit of mentioning things that would
be
heaven, but they were always excesses: If she could drink all night and not get hung over, that would be heaven. If she could fuck, eat, watch TV, and sleep at the same time, that would be heaven.
The sun was starting its descent in the sky, its light glancing in across the floor through the rubble-starred windows of the RV, but there were many hours of daylight left. Amy wondered how many of those hours she would see, and once more wished her heaven was real.
The convoy rolled over the last hill before Potter at four in the afternoon. They had made good time, but didn’t rush it: Murdo knew there could be
an ambush anywhere along the route. There had been three more graffiti warnings on the road, all of which he ignored. He knew that game. Get him to stop before he hooked up with reinforcements. Get him to doubt. Sow confusion among his men. Parker had threatened to stop the ASV, at one point. The message on the road was especially dire:
THE ZEROS
CAN HUNT
MEN.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Parker said.
“It means they’re using psychological warfare, dumbass,” Murdo explained. Estevez, up in the turret, didn’t seem upset by the messages scrawled on the road, but then, Murdo was pretty sure Estevez couldn’t read. There was some backtalk on the radio. Reese was on the verge of mutiny again, and Flamingo was shitting himself.
“How do we know it’s their people, not ours?” Flamingo asked. “They used code zero,” he added.
“Everybody knows code zero,” Murdo replied. “That fuckin’ sheriff even knew it.” It angered him to bring up the subject of that particular individual, so Murdo demanded five minutes of air silence.
At last they were close. Murdo saw a cloud of birds in the sky. A dusty blue tarpaulin flapped across the road as they motored past a scenic overlook. And then they were on the hill above Potter. The town looked sleepy and dull and calm. There was a final remark written there on the road at the crest of the hill, so fresh Murdo could smell the aerosol without descending from the M1117. It was straight to the point: The fuckers must have been running out of paint.
YOUR DEAD.
“No, I’m not,” Murdo said aloud.
The tarpaulin caught the breeze and tumbled away over the hill like a loose patch of sky. Murdo climbed up next to Estevez in the turret of the M1117, took the lens caps off his binoculars, and scanned the town of Potter, California, for signs of Hawkstone’s presence. And he couldn’t believe his luck. There was the train, three hundred feet of glorious Hawkstone camouflage with the screaming eagle on the side and some serious
rock-and-roll hardware on the flatcars in the rear. Five passenger cars that would carry upward of ninety men each. They were back in business. But things might not be as they seemed. He remembered the warning from the dead sheriff:
The zeros are getting faster
. Murdo was no fool. He’d brought all those troublesome civilian assholes for a reason: They were going to walk into town. If they made it, Murdo was going to drive.
The visibility in the firefighting mask wasn’t very good, and the oxygen cylinder on her back raised hell with the scars, but at least she wasn’t leaving a plume of breath smell behind her. Danny was on foot. She knew something was wrong, even more wrong than the last time she was here. High overhead, a fleet of vultures was circling. The crows were watching from the tress and wires overhead. Days before, the streets of Potter had been strewn with ordinary corpses and comatose zeros, waiting for prey. Hundreds of them. Now there were only corpses. The zeros were gone. And it wasn’t because the zeros had finally perished of hunger. There weren’t enough bodies in the street.
Something had driven the undead out. Danny thought she knew what that was. She remembered the way the undead were massed along the barrier that divided San Francisco. Tens of thousands of them clawing at the wire and rubble, trying to get in. At the time, Danny had thought it odd that they were struggling at the barrier in such numbers; if they hunted by sense of smell, surely the smoke of the fires would have masked the breath of living things? They weren’t supernatural. They operated according to simple rules. She couldn’t believe they were smelling the humanity huddled downwind of them, with the fires upwind. But Danny had had other things on her mind at the time. She dismissed the question because it didn’t influence her hypothesis of the moment.
But now, her boots gritting in the thick dust settled over Main Street, Danny thought the question had become pertinent in the extreme. She had a theory about what the zeros had been doing back there at the barrier.
They weren’t trying to get at the humanity on the other side. They were trying to get away from the hunters on
their
side.
She thought of the hunters, how they moved so silently together, each working in concert with the rest of the pack. They had—was it discipline? Better instincts? They had the edge, Danny knew that much. And the more she thought about it, the more sure she became. The lesser ones, the moaning, stupid zombies, had been trying to escape the clever ones. Danny’s mind was working fast, but her eyes kept watch on every angle of concealment, every possible approach. She needed to find a zombie. She didn’t need them to find her.
She thought of the mission she had undertaken in San Francisco. The slow specimens Danny and Magnussen had encountered on the freeway at first—they must not have known the swift ones were nearby. The hunters hadn’t gotten onto the freeway until then. The clever dead were scavenging through the neighborhoods where the living could still be found, huddled in attics and back rooms, thinking they might survive. That was why the surface streets were unexpectedly crowded with the undead on the far side of the freeway. They were migrating, just like the ones out in the desert. Migrating away from the approach of the hunters from outside the city. It was the arrival of Danny and Magnussen that attracted the hunters to come up onto the road.
Everything made sense when considered in this light. Danny felt sweat running down her sides and the prickling in her back was fierce. She carried a length of iron rod in her good hand, useful as a club, among other things.
Over her stump-hand she wore something Topper had assembled to her specifications. It was a kind of steel glove, spattered with bright pink paint from the spray cans, shaped like a cowbell where it fitted over her hand, and strapped to her wrist with a long belt of tire-tube rubber. Welded to the end where her fingers would have been was a six-inch spike shaped like the tip of a fireplace poker—a stabbing point with a curved hook at the base. Danny’s injury was encased in metal, only her thumb protruding through an opening in the side. Her main concern was avoiding infection. Not the zombie disease, to which she was apparently immune, but a rematch with the ordinary infection that had nearly killed her. She didn’t anticipate using the spike as a weapon. It would probably hurt so much she would black out.