And then she remembered the zero. The hunters were in town. Despite everything happening in front, she was going to have to watch her back. Her feet were responding again, so she made it around behind the Humvee. She was about to commit to her next move when it came at her, talons outstretched.
Amy heard the whine of the cannon powering up. They all knew the sound, from the demonstration they had received back at the airfield. She didn’t have to say anything. Whoever the watchers hiding in the shadows were, it was time to get moving. The women scattered. Because she was facing the wrong way, Amy didn’t get a chance to see if anybody but herself survived
the initial explosion of cannonfire. She took a single thigh-stretching step, then threw herself headlong at the building to her left. There was no sound except the pounding of the cannon. She felt the projectiles tearing her apart, but they weren’t. She was still alive. She threw herself forward again and hit something hard. It was the wall of the building. She scrambled around the corner, got to her feet, and began to run.
There was someone else beside her, and someone behind. Who they were, or how many, she did not know. Then the watchers that had been hidden all around them emerged from concealment, teeth bared, arms outstretched. Amy saw them for what they were, and her fear took wing.
If time had slowed around Danny when she charged the Humvee, now it was accelerating. Things were happening at a furious pace, events flashing before her eyes in staccato bursts. Danny stabbed the zero in the face as it reached for her, its momentum jamming her crude weapon into its head until the hilt grated against its eye socket. She pulled the spear tip out, kicked the creature back, and shot it.
When the 20mm had opened fire, less than a minute before, a strange kind of emptiness had come. With the sound of the cannon came the end of Amy, the end of old ties. Danny had come back for them, and this was her penance. She had only to complete her task, as much of it as she could before she was herself cut down or torn to pieces. Then they would have to get by without her. She would die before she was done. There was an inevitability to that. None of this was articulated in her mind. She thought only two words:
too late
. They encompassed all the rest.
The cannon had stopped firing after a single burst. They would know something was happening behind them now. Danny fired the shotgun twice into the Humvee. She didn’t waste time aiming, but held the weapon over her head through the tailgate and pumped the trigger. Two of the undead swarmed into the cab of the Humvee as Danny got away from it, and there was the ASV ahead of her with white gunsmoke drifting away in the sunlight.
The periods of transition from place to place seemed not to occur. Danny was here, and then there, where the next thing would happen. Another of the hunting undead was behind her. She turned and fired, and the thing was thrown off its feet. Danny shoved her back against the nearest wall, then ran forward. Up past the Humvee, the ASV’s cannon was swiveling around in the turret. She had to get close, below the maximum depression
of the barrel. All the deserts she’d ever fought in were blending together now, all the enemies. They were all thin shadows, flickering beneath a bright endless sun.
Murdo saw the dragon’s beard of cannonfire leap out over his head at the civilians, who were already scattering in every direction. The boom of the gun was deafening, a blanket of noise. One of the women, the dumpy one who cried all the time, spun and fell with her arm blown off at the shoulder. The rest were gone in a few strides. The tracers streaked down the length of Main Street, then caught the customized police cruiser. The lights on the roof exploded, red and blue plastic and shivers of chrome. The roof itself buckled and rippled with the impacts. Estevez was an artist. Chunks flew out of the tubular frame. He concentrated fire on the driver’s side and the occupant exploded. Estevez released the firing grips.
There was a problem. The blood spilling out of the police car was black, not red. And now there were gunshots. Everything was happening too fast.
“Behind us,” Murdo said, and Parker switched on the rearview camera. Just in time to see the dead sheriff rushing at them with a shotgun.
Parker threw the machine into reverse and powered it backward. The aft camera revealed a scene of carnage that had been masked by the roar of the cannon: The Humvee had been slammed into by a
second
police cruiser. Murdo understood in an instant. They’d been decoyed. They had stopped where she wanted them to stop, at the intervals she had expected, just like well-trained men. And then she fucked them up.
It didn’t look, from the bouncing, chaotic camera picture, as if anyone else was moving around back there. The sheriff was there in the middle of the street, and then she dropped, and the M1117 rushed over her. Parker slammed backward into the Humvee, pushing it into the wall of the building beside it.
“That’s how,” Murdo said, offering a high-five to Parker. Then he looked out the front porthole and saw the sheriff getting back on her feet. With the M1117’s eighteen inches of ground clearance, all she had to do was lie down.
She was making fools out of them. And now Murdo saw the game. The whole thing was clear. The sheriff had friends with her, a bunch of Arabs it looked like, dark people with white teeth. Except she was running from them, shooting at them. They were after her.
“Oh, fuck,” Parker said.
They were zeros, and they were
running
. Loping along like apes, but
fast
.
Estevez opened fire with the cannon and half a dozen of the things flew apart. In the distance the rose bushes in the park shivered and spat leaves as the rounds flew through them. The fountain in the middle of the park disintegrated. Craters appeared across the landscape, from which leaped columns of earth. Murdo had lost track of the sheriff now. She was the one. They had to stop her, above all. But she seemed to have disappeared.
“Reload me!” Estevez shouted.
Then the battered wreck of the custom police cruiser on Main Street shuddered to life. A gleaming hook tore out the remains of the windshield. The sheriff was inside it, and she was going to charge them.
Amy ran for her life.
“This way,” a voice said, and because it was in her left ear, she went left. There was a black rectangle. She ran inside and slammed into something and fell. There was a
bang
and darkness. They were inside a building. One of the things hit the other side of the door and started hammering on the wood.
Hands grabbed Amy and pulled her to her feet and now they were running again, almost dancing, between the objects inside the building. Storerooms and narrow corridors. It smelled of must and mildew. Then a large room with timbers overhead, dark, a million chairs and tables, tinware and cabinets. It was an antique shop, unlit except for a patch of sun on the floor that fell through the dust-clotted picture window on Main Street.
Michelle and Jimmy James were with her, running ahead of her in the shop. Amy ran after them, then hesitated—because she saw a strange vision through the window. The children were exhorting her to hurry up. But Amy had this vision to contend with.
It was Danny out there on Main Street, Danny with a shotgun, falling, and then the massive war vehicle went straight over her and crashed into something beyond where she could see. The next thing she saw was Danny on her feet again. Amy didn’t understand. It was a vision, that was all. A door crashed open elsewhere in the building, and Amy followed the children through an opening on the other side.
Danny couldn’t believe her luck when the police custom’s engine started. The gunner had concentrated his fire on the upper half of the vehicle; the
powerplant was intact. A couple of rounds had hit the cable-bound railroad ties on the front but hadn’t punched anything vital. The roof, however, looked like a big rumpled piece of metallic lace; the pillars that supported it were battered out of recognition. The interior was soaked in zombie guts and stank, but it wasn’t the worst Danny had been through.
Blood was flowing down her elbow from inside the steel amputation guard on her left hand. The spear point was bent. She had almost stabbed herself with it while clambering into the vehicle. No need to release the handcuffs with which she had bound the broken-legged zombie to the steering wheel: its arms were still cuffed in place, but the rest of the thing was gone. With her good hand Danny fired the shotgun twice, cleaning a couple of the fast zeros off the roof: They were prying at the metal, trying to get in.
She sank the accelerator to the floor and the machine responded, picking up speed. The M1117 Guardian rolled forward, like a maddened bull accepting the challenge of a matador. Its millwheel-sized tires churned the dust as it sped up. The distance between the vehicles was around two hundred meters. Danny had a loose idea of what she wanted to do. The hotel flashed away behind her on her left. Then the parking lot where she’d found the Mustang. A hunter-zero threw itself at her vehicle, and one of the custom overriders that projected from the railroad tie fender sank into its bony chest. The thing snapped its jaws, struggled, and was sucked under the wheels. Danny lost no speed, gathering momentum. Now the ASV was advancing fast, blotting out the sky like a battleship from her low perspective. The embankment alongside the hotel whipped past Danny next, with its ornamental steps down to the railroad station. Danny almost felt she was flying. In a few moments they would collide.
“
Run her the fuck down
,” Murdo shouted, hysterical with rage. Parker gunned the engine and the ASV surged forward toward the chewed-up carcass of the ugly police machine.
“Reload me!” Estevez shouted again.
“Hang on, bitch,” Murdo shouted back. “We’re playing fuckin’
chicken
!”
Estevez came down out of the tower and grabbed a couple of handholds. He couldn’t see forward from his position, but Murdo was making it perfectly clear what was happening. “Run her the fuck down. She dodges, you go the same fuckin’ way. This is the end game. She can’t fucking
touch
us up here!”
The distance was closing. The cruiser moved out of the shadow of the hotel, then it was out in the open, revving hard along Main Street with the panoramic view of the supply train down below. When this was over, Murdo was going to power that train up and drive it to Colorado, if he could. They would join up with Base HQ there. One thing he goddamn well wasn’t going to do was stay here with zombies that could run and hunt. Then he ran out of thoughts and braced himself, because impact was only seconds away.
Amy followed the siblings through what seemed to be a private residence attached to the antique shop, itself a warren of junk and old, broken things, but there was a cookstove and a wall phone and a few little islands of normal life in there. They held each other’s hands to navigate the clutter. Behind them the hunters were crashing through the showroom, smashing things, knocking over furniture as they made the straightest course possible for the source of the prey smell.
The humans emerged, blinded by the sunlight after their brief journey through wooden caverns, on an alley. There was an awning overhead. At the end of the alley was a bloody mass of wreckage where a Humvee and a police car were tangled together, both stuck halfway into the side of the brick building opposite. Amy had to decide which way to run. Main Street was chaos, but wide open. The alley was narrow and the things could trap them there. She heard a voice. It was Becky, at the far end of the alley at the top of the hill, waving. Then she ran. Amy tightened her grip on the children’s hands and ran as fast as she could, towing them up the hill, braving the long, cluttered alleyway where anything could be waiting.
Behind them glass broke. A door banged open. The hunters were close behind them. Now all they could do was run, and hope they ran faster than the undead. Somewhere down the hill, there was a tremendous crash, the bright sound of metal crushing metal, and then a series of earth-shaking noises followed. Amy was hardly aware of this. All she heard was the pulse pounding in her ears, the slapping shoes and the gasping breath of the children beside her.
When the sheriff yanked the wheel of the police car, it was the last possible instant. Too late to save her, Murdo knew.
Too late
. Parker, shouting in triumph, spun the wheel of the ASV at the same time, keeping the police
special in his sights—and in that instant Murdo saw what she had done. The sheriff had tricked them.
Danny threw the wheel over. She could see into the cockpit of the ASV, time moving at impossible speed but every fleeting impression as vivid as pictures hung on a wall: crows in the blue sky above, brown-leaved trees. The massive grille of the ASV filling the passenger side windows of her vehicle. The nose of the police custom looking out over the trainyard. Then the door was open, and Danny was tumbling through the air. She heard an almighty impact, but happened to be facing the ground when it happened. She hit the embankment and rolled, the chrome guard on her hand stump flew off, and she tucked the wounded limb in her belly and kept on rolling.
When Danny came to a stop she was sprawled on her back on the chipped concrete train platform. Ten yards away, the ASV was completing its second barrel-roll down the embankment. It landed upside-down, squarely on its roof, the turret jammed into the buckled cement like some apocalyptic electrical appliance plugged into the earth. The astonishing thing was, the machine appeared to be undamaged. It had rolled twice in twenty vertical feet down the steep embankment, and yet looked very much like all that was required was a tow truck to get it upright again, and it could roll away intact.
Danny hoped the fuckers inside were dead, but she couldn’t count on that. And they weren’t trapped. The thing had hatches and doors all over it. Danny had to get to a weapon, fast, before they could emerge.
She stood up, and if she’d been in a better frame of mind she would have been pleased at the discovery that her limbs were mostly still working. She had thrown herself out of a speeding car and was pretty much uninjured. Except for her hand-stump, which was in trouble. The pain from that was so gigantic it was like the sound of a jackhammer: The ears went deaf from it. Her nerves were deaf from the shouting in her arm. Danny limped away down the platform, heading for the stairs.