It was a pity the zeros were incapable of fear, Danny considered:
They would fear this bad-ass hook
. Then it occurred to her the monsters
could
feel fear, but only of their own kind. And only of the superior ones.
Just like the living
. The problem Danny hadn’t anticipated was the absence of zombies. Without them, she would soon be nothing but another dead cop. But somehow, with the ones she’d seen before missing from the street, she thought the problem wasn’t that there were
no
zombies in town. They were here. They were just a hell of a lot better at not being seen.
She saw one at last. One of the stupid ones. It had a broken leg, the foot pointing around backward. It was dragging the limb along a side street that bordered the park at the edge of town opposite the hotel; its course would take it out into the open desert. The park was a small wilderness of trees, dead rosebushes, and low walls. A lot of places a capable hunter could hide. But Danny had very little time to waste. It was this specimen, or she would have to switch to plan B. And she didn’t have a plan B.
She abandoned caution. Move. She came up swiftly behind the zombie. It was a female of middle size. Perfect. It lurched along beside a big, stone Spanish-style fountain that hadn’t worked in years, the centerpiece of the park back when railroads still meant something.
“Din-dins,” Danny said, her voice muffled by the firefighting mask. “Yummy.” She wished she could come up with better quips. But it worked.
The zombie heard Danny and forgot its efforts to get away from town. It came for her, the broken leg bending at a nauseating angle as it reversed course. The thing was dried-out looking, shriveled. The lips wouldn’t close and the eyelids were stretched tight, the once-brown hair now faded and dusty, missing in clumps. Its flesh looked too small for its skeleton.
It followed Danny through the park. She hadn’t anticipated finding one with a bad leg. It was taking forever. She could keep away from it at a stroll. But this was going to have to do. She only hoped the Hawkstone men didn’t show up before she was ready. More than that, she hoped the hunters hadn’t caught her scent. The breathing apparatus ought to help, but their senses were heightened. She could feel the cloudy eyes upon her, watching, waiting. She hoped that was only nerves. She checked the trees around her. The crows were still there.
As long as the crows stayed in the trees, Danny was safe.
The M1117 Armored Security Vehicle idled near a small, square, stucco house outside of town. There was a concrete Virgin Mary in the front yard. Estevez had his hands on the firing grips of the 20mm cannon, but Murdo had given him strict instructions not to shoot unless the women made a run
for it. The civilians walked toward town with their hands up, except the woman carrying the baby. Murdo figured her hands were as good as up. The veterinarian was out front, stomping along so she would get killed first. Or whatever her motivation was. Murdo guessed she was just trying to show them who was boss.
Knock yourself out, Doc. Hope there ain’t any zeros around
.
Reese was back up with the motor home, doing guard duty alongside the useless Jones. Reese was pissed about it, too, but Murdo wouldn’t have minded being up there on the hill instead of heading down into this fucked-up town. One thing was for sure: Murdo wasn’t letting Reese and Ace do anything together. He didn’t trust them. Murdo stood beside Estevez, searching town with the binoculars. His confidence that they had found Hawkstone’s regional HQ was shaken by the fact that there was nobody around, no guards on the road into town. There were no men on the roofs. There was nobody moving around down by the hotel, where he expected his people would have bunked up. They liked the best, did the Hawkstone brass. It looked like a comfortable hotel.
Amy’s heart was slamming so hard she thought her ribs might come loose. Potter was where Danny had gone to look for Kelley. Danny came back alone, so no Kelley in Potter. That wasn’t a good sign. The inch of dust and sand over the street wasn’t a good sign either. The dark traffic lights, also not a good sign. The shrunken bodies lying in the gutters? Not good either.
Murdo had frog-marched them all out of the motor home at the top of the hill. He said they were going to walk, because he didn’t trust them to behave. That meant nothing. Rather, he didn’t have the guts to tell them they were bait. Murdo looked sick. His face was waxy. Amy thought it was raw fear she was seeing, because Murdo had been so very certain things were going to go his way in Potter. Now it appeared they might not.
There was a huge train loaded with stuff at the station, but it was covered in dust. It had been there a while. If that was Murdo’s headquarters, things might not be one hundred percent awesome in Hawkstone’s command structure. That is, unless Hawkstone was in the habit of abandoning its command posts.
A whirling dust devil made its way through downtown.
Amy studied Main Street as she approached it. There were bodies lying on the ground. They could be zombies, or just dead bodies. She looked up at the vultures circling high overhead. There were crows in the trees.
•
It was Troy Huppert who persuaded the rest of the men to let Danny go alone. He was the kind of man who kept in the background unless something needed doing. Troy liked Danny. He liked her a lot. While she was away on her adventures he’d tried to figure out how he was going to take some role as a leader—and never got the hang of it. Too many alpha males in their group. It was a relief to have Danny back, the unstoppable alpha female. But now he understood something about her: She was going to do what she was going to do, and they would get by somehow whether she lived or died.
Here she was, telling them she wanted to take her new car for a spin. She was surrounded by wrecked cars and a wrecked world, one hand chopped apart, beat all to hell, the customized police car idling at the open gates, and saying she was going into town
alone
. Topper and Ernie started arguing right away, the others jumped in next, and you couldn’t hear yourself think. They were all fired up to get down to Potter and make some noise. This was their fight, too. Danny was trying to explain what she had in mind. They weren’t listening. Finally Troy did a sharp two-finger whistle.
“Let the lady explain herself,” he said. It worked. He so seldom pressed his will on the group, he had leverage just by the novelty of it. Danny nodded her appreciation.
“Listen up because there’s not much time,” Danny said. “I been going solo for a while now and I figured out it’s a pretty good way to get things started. It’s not a good way to get things finished.”
“She
can
be taught,” Patrick muttered. Danny was unconsciously massaging her primitive steel hand protector. “Potter is full of the undead. These Hawkstone assholes are taking our friends there. They used Patrick as bait before, and I think that’s what they’re going to do with everybody else in Potter. That means they’re not so sure Potter is a happening town anymore. The way I see it, they’ll just keep sacrificing people until they hook up with their command unit. That means this is an ongoing situation.”
She looked around at the men, appraising them. Troy tried to imagine what Danny saw: Don, the plump older man, was starting to look like a tough guy, hands greasy, face suntanned. Patrick, with his busted face, looked like toughest guy there. He probably was. The rest were looking pretty fit and capable, too. What had once been a random collection of isolated, scared individuals was now a team, after a fashion. And they were getting stronger, not weaker. Troy thought they might possibly get through this thing together. He hoped Danny felt the same way.
Wulf, on lookout up above on the butte, broke into Troy’s contemplations with a raucous shout: “You better move your ass, Sheriff, they’re coming!”
All eyes returned to Danny. Troy’s heart was racing. He wanted to get moving. He’d do whatever it took.
“If we mount an assault,” Danny continued, “they will fuck us up royally. There is a twenty-mil cannon on that M-eleven-seventeen. There is a Ma Deuce on the Humvee—that’s a .50 caliber Browning. They got all kinds of armament. And they’re expecting trouble. What I got in mind is to use the zeros in town to our advantage, right? I won’t be alone. I’m going to have an undead army at my back. For that, I gotta work solo.”
“No you fuckin’ don’t,” Topper reasoned.
“Just listen,” Danny said. “I’m an expert by now. If I get killed, you all follow these boys and catch ’em at the next stop. But I’m not going to get killed.”
“Oh, really?” Patrick said, in his most arch tone of voice. “How do you know that?”
“’Cause I can’t fuckin’ die,” Danny said, and seventy seconds later she was spray-painting a message down at the intersection.
Then she was accelerating her bizarre machine down Ore Creek Highway to Potter, opening up a long lead on the convoy still rumbling along the road that led from Boscombe Field. Somehow, what Danny had said was frightening to Troy. It silenced the arguments. In a time when death was no longer final, immortality didn’t seem far-fetched. But what chilled him to the core was the way she said it. With regret.
In fact, Danny could
absolutely
die. That thought was uppermost in her mind. She saw the Hawkstone convoy at the crest of the hill into town, and she knew showtime was about to begin. The problem was, as far as she could tell, she had captured the only zero in town. The desert around Potter was swarming with them, but the city had been cleared out. Without zombies, she had absolutely no idea what to do.
When she had told her guys back at the junkyard she was going to have her own army of the undead, it sounded crazy—but she felt like a snake charmer by now. She knew what to do, and what she could get away with. The men understood that. If they came along with her, somebody was going to get jumped on or bitten and then the whole scheme would fall apart. This was Danny’s show, and hers alone.
But now, sitting in the interceptor in an alley with a view of the hill and Main Street, she was starting to panic.
Where the hell were the zeros? It had never occurred to her the place would be free of the undead. She had taken it for granted they would be here. That was always the fatal mistake: taking anything for granted. She should be grateful the place wasn’t swarming with walking corpses, and yet they had become part of her world. She
needed
them.
Danny watched the convoy stop, and saw the Hawkstone mercenaries shoving the civilians out of the White Whale. She saw her friends begin the march down the hill into town, hands raised, like prisoners of war.
She briefly lost sight of the ASV and the Humvee. They were among the buildings of town, now, moving in and out of view, creeping along behind the hostages. Danny was positioned among the low, wood-framed buildings on the hill that rolled down through Potter and ended in the steep embankment above the train station.
She decided that plan B was going to be plan A without the possibility of her own personal survival. That would have to do. In a few moments, the hostages would cross the end of the alley that opened on to Main Street. She would let them pass. Then the ASV would roll by. She would let that pass. When the Humvee reached the end of the alley, she was going to charge.
With any luck, she wouldn’t break her neck on impact, and the attack would draw the attention—and the fire—of the ASV crew. At that point, with the guns pointing in the opposite direction, the hostages were going to have to scatter and run for it. Danny expected they wouldn’t need coaching. Patrick and the rest would come get them later on. Danny was sure her men weren’t far behind, probably waiting on the other side of the hill to see how things went down. By that time, the Hawkstone boys would be long gone. At least Danny would have the satisfaction of killing one of them, if she hit the Humvee squarely in the driver’s side door.
Danny’s good hand was slick with sweat on the wheel of the interceptor. By now, the mercenaries would be able to see the decoy she’d set up—the decoy that required a street full of zombies. It would give them something to wonder about. But it was no longer part of the plan.
Murdo told Parker to stop. He was up in the turret with Estevez, suffocating from the man’s rank armpit smell. The women, led by the veterinarian, stood in the street ahead of the ASV. The hotel was off to the right, on a
steep embankment with the train station below it, the rest of town to the left, on a hill. There was a park up there, dying from lack of irrigation. Rows of shitty brick and clapboard buildings. This was a two-story town at best. It was all mud-colored from the dust and sand. There were bodies on the ground, but they didn’t look like zeros. They were bird-eaten and stiff. There was no sign of a Hawkstone welcoming party. Nothing. The town was deserted.
Except up ahead, halfway down Main Street in front of the hotel, there was a police car. Or what used to be a police car. It had some kind of frame built around it and wire mesh over all the windows, and a massive timber fender that made the front end look like a siege weapon. The roof lights were flashing red, white, and blue. Even two hundred yards away, Murdo could see the silhouette of the driver inside. Wearing one of those campaign hats. Whoever this lone-wolf cop was, they had about ten seconds to get the fuck out of town.
Then Parker said, “Radio for you, boss.”
“Tell him to get the fuck out of the way.”
“It ain’t a him, Murdo.”
A trickle of premonitory alarm ran down Murdo’s back. He climbed awkwardly down inside the ASV and jacked himself into the passenger seat, from which he could see the cop car up ahead through the narrow fore window. The civilian women were starting to put their hands down, looking around, looking back at the ASV. He thought of telling Estevez to shoot one of them, to keep the rest in line, but he didn’t think Estevez would be able to stop at one. Instead, Murdo took up the radio handset.
“Police band,” Parker said.
“This is the unit commander,” Murdo said into the microphone.