Five months after the crisis began, the world was different. It was greener. Mankind’s stiff-arm distance from other forms of life had been relaxed. Small trees and grass and flowers grew through the cracks in the ocean of asphalt laid down by an ambitious species without a long-term plan. Animals roamed freely, their keen senses adapted to keeping them away from the undead. The skies were blue again over the cities. Great skylines of architecture had been blunted down, felled by fire and warmaking, these sand-castle ruins subsequently flattened by epic rains that came that first winter. An earthquake—probably the Big One, except nobody measured it—sank San Francisco halfway into the bay. Men saw the cities fall, but did not care. Fewer places for death to lie in wait.
Nobody knew how many living human beings were left. The rest of the world was once more out of reach, a frightening place where mariners touched the fringes of land, then sailed on. There were stories of everywhere and news from nowhere. There was no internet, no telephone. Satellite communications were mostly lost: The ground systems required to track and maintain orbits had gone offline, and attempts to restore them failed because the satellites were lost in the sky. Many of those had already fallen.
Some said China was almost intact and planning to invade the globe. The Living Death was of Chinese manufacture. That’s why you never saw Chinese zeros. Others said the disease had come from the mass graves in Haiti, extracted by Nazi extremists planning to raise the Fourth Reich. Some said the American government had come up with the plague as a way
to reinstate its crumbling empire. It was all bullshit and conjecture, idle talk to fill the hours of wakefulness before the sun came up.
The zeros seemed to have reached their zenith. Their evolution peaked with the discovery that window glass could be broken with a stone. Had they continued to improve their intelligence and skill, had they been able to think, mankind would already have been extinct. Everyone agreed with that.
Now mankind was engaged in a game of keep-away. If men could stop getting eaten for long enough, the zeros would rot away. The difficulty was men kept getting eaten. The monsters remained prosperous, after their fashion. They felt no cold in winter, unless they froze, in which case they were finished; sometimes in the snow season men would find ghouls in nests, hundreds strong, huddled in stinking cellars where the things waited out the storms like huge, wingless bats. Their survival strategies seemed based on instincts dead for a million years in mortal men. They endured no pain, no fear, felt nothing but insatiable hunger; their self-interest extended only as far as the feast. They did not need to think.
Men, meanwhile, had begun thinking again in earnest.
Danny’s Tribe moved slowly across the country. They weren’t going anywhere in particular—the idea was simply to keep on going. They stayed sometimes in a promising place for a week at a time, then traveled on; once they spent a month near the cracked and overflowing Hoover Dam. There was always something to move their band along. The zeros would get thicker in the area, or the survivors would hear rumors of an army of men coming, cannibals that styled themselves after the undead, or destroyers, or zealots.
The zealots angered Danny the most. The destroyers were hordes of nihilistic gangs that wrecked and killed and burned because, in their estimation, what was left of the world was trash anyway. They engaged the zeros in pitched battles and helped feed their numbers, suffering bites and infections that left the dying scattered along the roads. When Danny found them, they would be taken in and cared for until it was time to make The Choice. The rest wandered off to die, and came back ravening.
The zealots believed the world was
supposed
to be like this. It was their beloved End Times, and the hand of God was upon the land. They grew strong on their heady brand of magic, writing new chapters to append to the old Bible, full of portents and signs. They had rules, too, but their rules
were arcane and punitive and cruel. Danny would find their victims nailed to crosses or burned at the stake. The living flocked to these preachers of death, who seemed to flourish more, the worse things got. Danny might not have resented them if it was not for their insistence that joy and pleasure were abominations, as if God would relent only when the last smile was wiped from the last child’s lips. Most of them didn’t even allow music. The ones who did favored dirges and laments. Danny’s Tribe, now a hundred strong most times, had their own little Woodstock nearly every Friday night, if there weren’t zombies around. Music was all they had left: Art, movies, books—these things were artifacts that required carrying and preserving. Music you could conjure up from nothing, like fire.
The latest of her working hypotheses had yielded two organizing principles toward which Danny moved her Tribe.
The first was a safe place. Safety was a far more transient thing than it appeared. Even the mightiest fortress would fall. So they moved along, and found places that were safe for a while. But the place where the undead couldn’t prosper—that place eluded them. Danny was sure there were tropical islands like that. She imagined Hawaii must be nice, by now. But they were in the American West. So far they’d never made it east of Kansas. The zeros were just too thick. Survivors said the Eastern Seaboard was an unrelieved nightmare.
The second desirable outcome, from Danny’s standpoint, was to find a cure. There were people of science working on it here and there, when they weren’t fleeing for their lives. The virus that caused zombiism was known. It had a number. Some said it was surely a virus engineered to do what it did, a combination of this and that until a perfectly lethal sickness was invented, not only deadly but wicked. It was said that the virus was part mosquito, for the sense of smell, part Hanta Virus for its ability to amplify so rapidly through the host. Other things. Rabies. Eye of newt. It didn’t matter.
So far there was no cure, and no vaccine to immunize the living. Some people were born immune. Others carried the sickness inside them but did not sicken. Some got bitten, sickened, and survived. They were so few.
In the spring Danny’s Tribe picked up the trail of a larger band of people, run with fairness according to homesteaders who encountered them in the occasional fortified settlements they passed. The larger band, calling
themselves the Rovers, had their own set of rules, and ran things along military lines. Discipline was tight but it wasn’t arbitrary. They were doing pretty well, folks said. Danny had a theory that groups could get too large for travel. She kept her band capped around one hundred individuals, simply because beyond that she didn’t recognize everybody. It got harder to gauge the merit of individuals. Cliques formed. Little knots of people started coming up with their own plans and rules, which inevitably ran at cross-purposes to the larger group. And it got harder to coordinate self-defense.
Sure enough, as they got closer to the Rovers, who moved more slowly due to sheer mass of numbers, the funeral pyres got taller. The Rovers were decent about it, it seemed to Danny. They burned the undead in one pile and their dead in another; most traveling bands left the undead where they lay, which poisoned the water supply and fouled the air. And the Rovers left behind memorials. It was usually a piece of sheet metal with the names of the dead scribed into it, laid over the ashes and held down with stones.
As Danny’s convoy crept closer to the larger party, day by mile, the pyres of the burned undead got smaller, and the pyres of the newly dead got bigger. Danny had taken to reading the lists of names scratched into the memorials. She didn’t know about zombies in China, but people of every race and creed were still dying. Vehicles full of good supplies were often left behind. Danny found herself drinking more—she’d gotten it under control since the events at Potter, nerves buffered by routine, but the tension was getting to her.
The funeral pyres showed up most often in the derelict towns the Tribe passed through. Towns were deadly. The bigger, the more dangerous. People wandered away from the group. Got greedy and went looting. Found a nest of the undead and got bit. If their numbers were strong enough the silent, undead hunters would surround a foraging party and there would be a battle.
One day they came upon a pyre of the dead around which the undead had been left where they fell, burned in place with hasty splashes of gasoline. Several vehicles had been left behind in what looked like a defensive ring. The list of the dead was written on a piece of cardboard held down with a brick. Danny read the list and wept and nobody knew why. Most of them had never seen her respond with grief to anything.
“Will you find a nail or something and scratch these names onto a piece of metal?” she asked Topper, when he rode up to see what was happening.
He and Ernie took care of the job, and wondered about it. They didn’t spend as much time with Danny these days—she seemed to have her own world around her, and besides, they had women of their own, now. It was a shock to see her grieving.
Two days later they found a service center in the plains, a little cluster of hotel, diner, truck stop, and bus station. The place had been looted long before, but still served as a waypoint; the names of different bands that had traveled that way were painted on the side of the motel. There were zeros strewn around. The remains hadn’t been dealt with at all. Blood on the pavement. The human dead were heaped up and hastily set fire to. The remains, not ashes but roasted flesh, were still warm when the Tribe rolled in. They had their own difficulties with the zeros in that area, and lost a few people. Danny thought the proximity to the larger band put them at risk: the more of the living, the more of the undead. But they traveled on. There was no memorial in that place, and the dead went nameless.
Danny asked Amy to ride with her that day.
“What’s eating you?” Amy asked, as the miles rolled slowly beneath them. And then: “So to speak.”
“Remember Barry Davis?”
“No. Was he the Davises’ kid?”
“Jesus, Amy.”
“Well?”
“Yes he was the Davises’ kid. I mean anybody named Davis is the Davises’ kid. But he was
that
kid of
those
Davises. He was going steady with Kelley.”
“I didn’t know that,” Amy said.
She had delivered a baby earlier that week, her first time with a human infant, and the thing was still alive. She only hoped the parents didn’t blame her for how ugly it was. But the parents weren’t exactly supermodels. Still, in the animal world, all babies are born beautiful. With humans it was obviously different.
“He’s dead,” Danny said, obviously expecting Amy would grasp the significance of that. She didn’t. After Amy was silent a while, Danny explained.
“Barry Davis was Kelley’s boyfriend. Her
real
one, not all the imaginary
ones I thought she had. He’s in The Note. They left Forest Peak together the morning everything went to shit.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
They drove in silence for a while.
“Do you like that guy in the old Toyota—the one who makes the guitars?” Danny said.
“He’s okay,” Amy replied.
The silence wore on.
“Remember that place where we found the ashes marked with cardboard?” Danny said, after a while.
“Yeah. You cried.”
Amy saw where Danny was going with the Barry Davis thing, and she didn’t want to get into it. Danny had put her Kelley period behind her, although she still kept the filthy, tattered note in a plastic bag next to her heart. She was looking to the future again, even if she had no personal plans. The Tribe gave her something to do, something to perpetuate. If Danny got thinking about the past, she was going to end up crazy and alone again.
“The thing is,” Danny said, “there was a Barry Davis on that list back there.”
“It’s not an unusual name,” Amy protested. “If he was like Barry Hashimoto maybe. Or Mogambo Davis.”
“Still.”
It would explain why Danny was allowing the convoy to get closer to the Rovers, rather than falling back, as was her custom. She had found out the hard way that traveling bands of men don’t mingle well. They’re glad to meet, but once the drink flows, they’re quick to fight. They mix up whose mate is whose. They have trouble coordinating night watches, and someone gets carried off in the night and their bones are never found. But now she was pushing to catch up, if anything. Danny had been urging them to pack their gear and get rolling much earlier than usual, and she rode herd longer into the afternoons.
She and Amy passed the rest of the day’s travel quietly, as old friends will. Both of them were thoughtful.
The next day, they saw smoke.
They were somewhere in the Dakotas. The winter was coming: Danny thought they should probably head south before too long. Traveling was slower than ever, what with bridge collapses and little trees growing right in the middle of the interstates. If it got cold too soon—and the weather was wholly unpredictable now—they’d be stuck in some place living like Eskimos until spring.
She had been pushing to get close to the Rovers. She wanted to have a talk with their leaders, although perhaps as a solo envoy of her people, to save mixing with the larger band. They were obviously in disarray and she didn’t know how desperate they were. They might decide her orderly baggage train was just what they needed to put themselves right.
Whatever plans she had made to that effect went out the armored window of her cruiser when she saw the smoke. It was a fire out in the prairie, the black smoke rising up against a gray, featureless sky that left the world without shadows. Her first instinct was to accelerate and catch up with the action, but she had people to take care of. She called a halt by the roadside. Recon was called for. Although this duty generally fell to the bikers, this time she wanted to join in. Topper and a big, scar-faced man called Pike elected to come along. Topper had lost a lot of weight. There were no more heavy people in this world. He looked pretty good, for an ugly bastard. Pike, on the other hand, made ugly an art form. As always when she rode out, Danny put Amy in charge. You never knew.