“What’s happening?”
It was Patrick, come up from the middle of the column. He had weathered into his broken face, and he was tough as brass. He had a boyfriend, a guy from Philly who had walked and fought a thousand miles before he ran into the convoy. People called him “Beowulf,” because his story sounded like something from Norse mythology. He’d killed hundreds of zombies, entirely with hand weapons. Patrick had become very centered with him, more emotionally self-sufficient.
Danny shook her head. “Old business.”
“You still think—”
“Who knows,” Danny said. But her eyes were on the horizon. She thought she knew.
“Remember we’re here,” Patrick said. “You’re not alone.”
They drove down the interstate at refreshing speed, not having to keep slow for the White Whale and the overloaded campers that made up the heart of the convoy. Danny kept her windows down and felt the freezing air blowing around her. It was that kind of weather: warm enough until the air started moving. Old thoughts Danny had buried in shallow graves were coming up. She banished their ghosts. Just go and see. Just go and see.
It was a city, not just a town. One of those places that sprang up around a missile installation in the far end of nowhere, all built at the same time, with an Army base and a high school and somewhere to buy groceries. Then it grew and some kind of industry came along and the place thrived for a while, same as all such towns, with good suburbs and low-rent neighborhoods, competing schools, white frame churches that stuck up like stalagmites. Then the downturn came and the place shriveled until it was half-empty at best. Then the dead rose up, and now the city was empty altogether.
They stopped at the only high place around, an overpass on the interstate where a local farm road passed beneath. Pike’s motorcycle was a “rat bike,” a monstrous, rusting piece of ironwork with scythe blades on the wheel hubs and ape-hanger handlebars, a scrap-metal beast. Topper rode a stock ’75 Harley boattail he’d liberated from an abandoned garage. They swapped a pair of binoculars back and forth.
Nothing moved but the flames, so they followed the smoke. The heart of the city was on fire. On the outskirts of town they found burning vehicles and signs of recent combat. Brass cartridges and incongruously colorful plastic shotgun casings were strewn around street corners where pitched battles had been waged. Vivid gore stood out in contrast to the drab masonry and faded tar. There were trails of blood, as if the pavement had been swabbed with blood-soaked mops. The bloody stains led toward the inner city, not away from it.
Danny called off the search after only a few blocks. Whatever had happened here, it was only hours past. It looked like two competing nomadic groups had clashed; the tells of the fighting did not bear any resemblance to the pattern of zero assaults. This had been a two-sided confrontation lasting at least several minutes—the conflict had clearly been pressed from street
to street. The undead didn’t fight, they attacked. Lightly armed, Danny and her two companions were not going to profit from a chance encounter with either of the competing sides.
As they made their way out of the city, they saw zombie blood. It was spattered on the ground and on the walls of desolate buildings. The fallen undead had been dragged away, as well. With that, Danny was familiar: It was the mark of the Rovers. Why, then, were those bodies dragged in the opposite direction from the red-blooded corpses of the recently alive? She and her companions followed the drag marks to where the black blood formed pools, after which the signs ended. The zombie remains had probably been loaded into a vehicle. Now that she had her back to the fire in the city, Danny could see a blurred finger of smoke rising from a suburb to the east. She consulted with Topper and Pike on whether they should pursue the matter, and the men said yes, because they could hear the urgency in Danny’s voice.
“Got nowhere else to be,” Topper said.
They came to a broad, concrete plaza overlooked by a jolly sheet-metal clown: It was the entrance to a small amusement park. The plaza was surrounded by acres of parking. It was hard to imagine the place doing much business even in the best of times, but during the summer it might have been something to do with a boring Saturday. The parking lot was forested with lighting standards on which various comic characters were mounted: The lion was 3A, the monkey in a hat was 5G, and so forth. Beyond the entrance gates were ticket booths and turnstiles, and beyond those, a mock-cowboy town with Victorian shop fronts, a saloon, and a carousel. Beyond the imitation town were thrill rides as still and faded as dried flowers, and at the far end of the park a couple of skeletal roller coasters hunched their spines. Opposite the amusement park was a shopping center. On the unobstructed sides, there were views to the south that took in miles of featureless grassland, and to the north was the city.
The pyre of corpses had been hastily arranged in the center of the plaza directly in front of the gate of the amusement park, where ornamental shrubbery had once spelled the name of the place, but was long dead and now illegible.
When Danny, Topper, and Pike rode up to the crackling heap of corpses, they saw a Volkswagen microbus parked not far from the blaze. The windows of the bus were reinforced with barbed wire stapled to bolted-on
wooden uprights. There was a woman sitting in the open side door, her head hanging. She held a pistol in her hand, loosely, drooping toward the ground, the way in an easier time she might have held a telephone handset after receiving bad news. When the woman heard the motors approaching, she turned her head to listen; at length, she looked up.
Danny climbed out of the cruiser. The men stayed back. There was electricity in the air. Pike had it in mind to ask what was up, but thought better of it when Topper gave a single, curt shake of his head.
This might be a good time for a moment of silence
.
There are no coincidences, Harlan had once told Danny; it’s only the odds coming due. Danny walked toward the woman in the bus, and felt as if her legs had turned to new-fallen snow. They didn’t feel substantial enough to hold her off the ground, but they kept moving, and she kept getting closer, and then they met.
“I got your note,” Danny said.
The men left them and went back to the convoy to deliver the news: the sheriff would be away for a few days. She was fine, she was dandy, in fact. But she had some family business to take care of. Sure, she’d catch up. Meanwhile, the doctor was in charge. Most folks didn’t know the significance of this intelligence. Amy wanted to go to them right away, but Topper insisted. Danny had been very clear on the point. There was something new in that city. It was a trap. Something so dangerous they weren’t going anywhere near. The sheriff would catch up with them. When had she failed to come back?
Danny got Kelley into the cruiser with difficulty. She had great facility living with one functional hand now, and the builders in the Tribe had an informal competition going for who could invent the most useful replacement for her severed fingers. Normally she wore an ordinary glove. But lugging a person who couldn’t support her own weight, that took two hands. With Kelley arranged in the front seat, Danny got out of that cursed city. She headed south, because that’s where the nearest road went.
“I got bit,” Kelley said. It was the first time she’d spoken.
“Yeah, I see,” Danny said. “I’m sorry.” She meant far more than
sorry about the bite
.
Kelley nodded. She was tired. “Not your fault,” she said, and meant far more, too.
Danny’s mind was whirling. There was so much to say, so many things jumbled in her head. She wanted to hear more of that familiar voice coming from the thin, strong woman who looked so much like the girl who had run away, but was also someone else—someone entirely her own.
“It’s good to see you,” Kelley said, as they drove along the narrow two-lane road away from town. The tall grass on either side of them, pale and yellow, had been crops, in past years. Now it was prairie again. Genetically modified corn couldn’t compete with sturdy grass.
“Do you mind if I don’t explain?” Kelley continued. “What happened back in Forest Peak, I mean.”
“Just talk about what you want,” Danny said. “It’s all past now.” Grief was pulling her chest apart and cramming it into her throat.
Kelley smiled a little. “Let’s skip the ancient history, then. You need to know what happened back there in town. They’re smart, Danny. And fast.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Like wolves.”
“No—like men,” Kelley said. She had to stop for breath. There was a strip of gingham fabric bound around Kelley’s wrist. It was bleeding through, right where a wristwatch should be. Her skin already had the pallor of the infected, as if she were turning slowly into limestone.
“Like men,” she said again. “They
shot
at us, Danny. They came after us with weapons…and they could talk.”
“They weren’t zeros, then. They were cannibals.”
“Not with black
blood
.” Danny heard in Kelley’s reply the old, exasperated tone of voice she’d heard so many times before. Big sister, why don’t you listen? Danny remembered trying to convince Magnussen of the more able zombies, back during her stint in San Francisco, and how frustrated she became when that woman wouldn’t listen. She understood part of what it was like to be Kelley. The recognition fell into place in a moment, without articulate thought.
“I believe you,” Danny said. “I’m listening.” These were words her sister had wanted to hear for many years of her short life. Kelley continued, pausing now and then for breath, sinking slowly.
“They’re like us, Danny. We never saw anything like it. They got us good. Killed a bunch of people. A few day back—“
“I know,” Danny said. “I saw the marker.”
Kelley nodded. “It was horrible. You gotta get away from the cities, Danny. This is new. It’s made another evolution. A quantum leap. We’re in a whole new kind of trouble.”
She paused, then smiled and focused her glassy eyes on Danny. “You are, anyway. My troubles—You know. I’m almost out of troubles.”
As they drove, Kelley told Danny more about the attack, the dynamics of it. It was important, but Danny didn’t care. She would use the information later. Now she was concentrating on the sound of her sister’s voice. Memorizing it, the way she memorized The Note.
She had to remember this, all of this, because it was all she was going to get. Kelley told her then about how she had been bitten in the midst of hand-to-hand combat with the undead, and she remarked on the irony of Danny’s timing. Not that things wouldn’t have happened the way they did, anyway.
“You could make up ‘what if’ scenarios all day long and it would never make any difference,” Kelley said, and paused for breath. “There’s only what is,” she concluded.
Despite her aching heart, Danny smiled. She had spent the better part of a year making up “what if” scenarios. Her sister, meanwhile, had become philosophical in her old age.
They came to a farmhouse set back a little way from the road behind a couple of fields. Danny didn’t bother with recon. She pulled up in the yard and helped Kelley out of the car and Kelley used the shotgun as a crutch while Danny broke in through the front door. The house had the stagnant atmosphere of abandonment. If there were zeros here, they would be dealt with.
For now, she made a fire in the dining room fireplace, breaking the chairs into kindling. Kelley sat in a dingy green velvet wing chair Danny dragged in from the living room. Danny put some bottled water to Kelley’s lips, and her sister drank some and the rest ran down her chin. There was nothing else to do. Kelley rested her head against one of the wings.
“You know the choice about dying,” Kelley said. “I decided to show I had the stones to do it myself. But when the others left me there, I couldn’t. Five minutes before you showed up, I was trying to talk myself into it. Had the gun to my head. I think I could do it now, though.”
“Do I bore you that bad?” Danny said, aiming for a joke. It evaporated in the air.
“You’re pretty famous,” Kelley said. “People have heard of you. I tell ’em I’m your sister. They say you dressed up in black leather and fought the zeros at the Battle of the Bay, and got a lot of people out of San Francisco.”
Danny didn’t want to hurt her sister’s feelings—she could hear the pride in the thin, faint voice. She bent the corners of her mouth up as if smiling.
“They say you’re the one that warned them the zeros were evolving,” Kelley added. “People escaped by sea.”
So maybe some of them had gotten out, after all, Danny thought. The history was garbled, but none of that mattered. Danny knew her exploits got around, but it was only bull to keep the darkness at bay. If a few lives got saved, that was something real. Kelley fell silent and still. Danny was frightened.
“Kelley?”
“What.”
“Don’t stop talking.”
“I’m gonna have to. You know that.”
“Until then.”
Danny’s sinuses ached. Her eyeballs felt too big for their sockets. This wasn’t the same as the grief she had felt when their parents died. It was bigger, something connected to the passage of such tempestuous time. She was twice the age now. There was so much more to be atoned for.
“Maybe you’re immune,” she said. Kelley lifted her good hand an inch above the arm of the chair, the closest she could get to a dismissive gesture.
“Don’t go there.”
“So,” Danny said, trying to think of what they needed to catch up on before they parted ways. “Uh, you had the same boyfriend this whole time. Barry. Did you guys—I mean were you in love?”
“Nah. It was good to know somebody, though.”
“And this whole time you traveled with the Rovers?”
“After they formed up. We were with some people before that. You know, just fighting and staying awake. I’m so tired now. I could really sleep.”
“Sleep later,” Danny said.
Kelley didn’t answer. Danny felt the panic come back. She was kneeling in front of Kelley, now, watching. The gun was in Kelley’s lap. It slipped and Danny tried to catch it, but with her left hand. The gun bounced off her truncated palm and hit the floor. Kelley opened her eyes again.