by Sean Platt
Alice looked at Bobby. She knew his shows were best-of reels by definition (Bobby said it took forty hours of hunting to get enough good footage for twenty-two minutes’ worth of show), but she still hadn’t been prepared for how much missed nuance was in front of her now. The devil might be in the details, but apparently it wasn’t in the aired show, the outtakes, or the bonus footage.
“Why is nobody taking aim?” She looked at the other hunters — those who were part of Bobby’s team and those who’d booked paid charter on his bus. None were raising weapons to sight on the deadhead across the rock scree. There were hunters scattered across the reserve, but those who chose to ride with Bobby Baltimore were supposed to be the richest — and, supposedly, the best at bagging game.
“Because he’s not raging yet.”
“How can you tell?”
“Years of hunting.”
“But if you got closer, maybe he’d—”
“He wouldn’t, and he’s not. Trust me. That one’s still grazing. I’ll bet if we went over there, we could even have a simple conversation.”
That gave Alice the chills. It had often occurred to her that Panacea clarifiers had the worst jobs in the world, choosing who was curable and who was bound for Yosemite. Or rather, they had the worst jobs in the world if they were psychologically healthy … which, now that Alice considered it, wasn’t a condition that clarifiers were likely to maintain if they stayed on the job long. And if they were sadistic bastards, then clarifying was a dream job. Who lives? Who dies? I get to decide! Because if they got one wrong, who would know?
Alice’s neighbor Kelly seemed safe, but with her shambling gait, forgetfulness, and penchant for the rarest beef, she had to have been in the ballpark of her inflection point when initially clarified. But even the newly infected would eventually turn if left untreated, and then ultimately vanish in the Yosemite wilds.
“How long does it take for the greenest of them to turn?” Alice asked.
Bobby looked at her with amusement. Alice returned the look, feeling jealousy at his easy calm. The smug bastard wasn’t even breathing heavy. He certainly wasn’t watching every tree and boulder as if a group of deadheads was about to spring out and rush forward. But Alice couldn’t help it.
“I thought you were an expert.”
“I’m just asking for an on-the-ground account,” Alice replied, her tone more defensive than she’d intended. “I’ve heard rumors that the disease is evolving, with shortened incubation times. Plus, the chatter I’m getting from every Tom, Dick, and Harry who visits my blog. Some are legit and plenty are wackos, ranging from conscientious objectors to tinfoil theorists, but most are saying that clarifiers are erring on the side of selecting-against way too often for new infections. I figured that since you spend so much time in the wild, you might have some insight into aspects of SP-terminal behavior that we, who aren’t in the trenches, couldn’t possibly have enough perspective to — ”
“Look out!”
Bobby shot a hand toward Alice mid-rant, the heel of his palm striking her chest hard enough to knock her backward. His weapon came up in one fluid motion, like a reflex. Alice heard a guttural roar, like an animal’s, and suddenly saw three half-decayed things coming toward them too fast, seemingly having sprung from nowhere like macabre jack-in-the-boxes. There was a loud, booming report, flat and hollow like a cannon fired into an enormous pillow.
The sound echoed five times in rapid succession as flashes and activity strobed from the right. A great glut of something exploded from where Alice had been standing, and by the time she’d drawn another two breaths, she found herself looking down at her shirt, now covered in semi-congealed blood and clots of gore.
She looked up at Bobby, who was entirely covered in red. He lowered his weapon, as did the two hunters to his right who’d unloaded into the sneak attackers. All three guns were smoking at the ends, but the deadheads were now invisible: carcasses on the ground ahead, maybe, or burst like water balloons.
“Three weeks,” Bobby said.
Alice was still on her back, her heart pounding out of her chest, panting like a dog.
“What?”
Her eyes were everywhere at once, unable to focus. How many tens or hundreds of thousands of deadheads had Calais said were wandering the park? And of those tens or hundreds of thousands, how many were in the rockfall ahead of them now, waiting to tear Alice in half?
Bobby pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and casually wiped his face. “You asked me a question. The answer is that it takes three weeks for those dropped here, closest to their inflection points, to rage.”
CHAPTER NINE
PURGATORY VALLEY
CALAIS AND THE OTHERS (NOT to mention Bobby Baltimore’s producers, before she’d left home) had promised that although the act of hunting ferals in Yosemite was a high-risk experience by nature, Alice would be perfectly safe as long as she stuck with the crew. During the pop-up horror show that had just occurred, the camera operators had never flinched even when Alice realized she may have been screaming. They’d merely hung a few paces back, waiting. Apparently, spring-ups like that happened all the time — and, in fact, were highly coveted action sequences that viewers loved. While Alice had been on her back, mentally making her will, much of the crew had been silently cheering.
The trick was to stay back from the frontline hunters. Yosemite had a lot of terrific hiding spots. It was even a selling point for the family and friends of those who needed to be briefed: during the grazing period, their loved ones, who’d still have some of their right minds, would have plenty of places to stay low and out of sight. Nothing would get those people before their time, and hunters were only allowed to shoot what came at them. And when they turned and lost most of their interest in hiding? Well … at that point, they weren’t really people anymore, no matter what they looked like.
So Alice hung with the unarmed civilians. From back here, things were tolerable, though only barely. Maybe the crew had grown used to being in the hot zone, but to Alice it was as if the air itself was soaked in adrenaline. Deadheads might not try to hide, but there were enough obstacles that they did it accidentally all the time. As the group moved around, hunters in a wide outer perimeter and unarmed citizens in the center, surprises kept happening. Most were macabre discoveries: forgotten corpses from previous hunters who hadn’t cleaned their messes, deadheads who’d been devoured by animals, detached limbs and occasionally heads that refused to stop moving. But a few were targets, and the cameras grabbed more for their precious broadcast minutes.
Mostly, though, the hunt was tense but uneventful. Despite Alice’s early start, the time change meant she’d barely reached Yosemite by lunchtime, and Bobby’s group seemed to have saved what promised to be the more interesting hours for Alice to witness, record, and report. On the surface, she tried to be a pro: taking photos, taking video that could later be supplemented by his crew’s video, scribbling notes, asking questions when the mood didn’t seem to call for quiet. But deep down, Alice never unclenched. Every moment was life or death — or, depending on how you saw Yosemite’s residents, perhaps somewhat dead or more dead.
When they were high up with land sprawling below, Bobby identified vast herds of ferals roaming like wolf packs below them. They occasionally stopped, but never appeared to rest. There were three reasons for their breaks: They got bored by a zombie’s definition of ennui or forgot where they were going, they found something to tear apart, or they simply got stuck. That’s what had happened with the three who’d attacked earlier. They were in a small dip in the land with slippery sides to the rear, and had only found their way out when the approaching humans had called their attention to the dip’s other side, where egress was easy.
“The trick,” Bobby told Alice as they walked in the open, “is to outsmart them.”
“Okay.” That sounded somewhere between a platitude and a ridiculously obvious truism.
“It’s not hard. They’re only feral once they
have virtually no brain left. You know that kids game, where you stick out your thumb and pretend you’ve grabbed the kid’s nose?”
Alice nodded.
“That would work on a deadhead. Except with one difference.”
“What’s that?”
“They don’t care if it’s their own nose; they’d want to eat it anyway. Come on. I want to show you something.”
They crossed a rise. Once upon a time, Alice supposed much of what they were traversing must have been spectacular hiking ground. Now it was a fenced-in reserve for mad dogs needing to go madder. There was debate — particularly within higher-functioning levels of the SP-positive (or “necrotic”) community — whether euthanasia would be more humane than the Yosemite solution. For necrotics, it wasn’t an entirely hyperbolic discussion; before Necrophage, they’d have been shipped to Yosemite as well. But the problem with euthanasia always came down to the same sticky issue: Clarifiers (or perhaps doctors) would need to look still-coherent human beings in the eye and tell them it was time to die. They’d need to inform friends and family that Cousin Joe, who everyone had figured was curable and could still play backgammon, needed to be put down like a dog. There would be footage, if things went that way, of SP-terminal patients who disagreed with their clarification and had to be dragged, screaming, to their executions.
As places to go slowly insane before dying went, Yosemite wasn’t bad. And to think: after you died, you got to keep on going … until you rotted in the sun, freezer-burned in the cold, or a hunter ended you for good.
“Jesus,” Alice said when they reached the lip of a rise.
Below, in a shallow valley, was a collection of rudimentary lean-tos cobbled from fallen limbs and covered with pine branches. Some of the structures were elaborate, as if they’d taken months to construct and perfect. Milling between the makeshift shelters were twenty or thirty people who looked like they had palsy. All were slow and shambling but otherwise mobile, passing one another with acknowledgements and greetings. Even from high up, Alice could see intelligence on their faces through her binoculars.
“We call this Purgatory Valley,” Bobby said. “There’s a large, flat, clear space over there where they drop off new arrivals, and a kind of delta in the land funnels them in this direction. For some reason, there aren’t many ferals around here, and they leave the new arrivals alone anyway, though you’d never know it from the way newbies spend all their time looking around, trying to build barriers to defend against nothing.”
Alice scanned the group with the binoculars, feeling sad.
“It’s like a little village,” she said. “The houses are so … elaborate?”
Bobby nodded. “The shelters have been here almost from the beginning. Each new wave takes them over and makes them a little bit better. This is where they hide at first, a lot of them, hoping for something to save them.”
“Three weeks,” Alice said mostly to herself, remembering Bobby’s earlier words.
“They’ll stay one week at most,” Bobby said. “After that, the highest logic seems to leave, and they stop thinking of society and start thinking only of a more primitive form of self-preservation.”
“What’s that?”
“Going somewhere else. Then they turn. And then they die.”
Alice watched the small group of ramshackle structures. One of them seemed to be significantly taller than the others, as if it were the village’s center.
“Is that Town Hall there in the middle?”
“That’s Golem’s house,” Bobby said with something like wonder in his voice. He sat up straighter and, as if cued by Alice’s question, scanned the horizon. Behind him, the crew started to mumble as if anticipating what was coming and not liking it even a little.
“We don’t have time today, Bobby,” said the severe-looking woman in the gray suit. She still looked ready to attend a board meeting, and here was Alice, covered in crusting blood and guts.
“What’s Golem?” Alice asked as Bobby sighed, disappointed.
The woman answered, her voice thick with eye-rolling indulgence. “Golem is Bobby’s white whale.”
CHAPTER TEN
THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD
MORE SHOOTING. MORE KILLS.
ONE of the non-team hunters tried sneaking up on one of the deadheads he’d ended to cut something off as a trophy, but Bobby yelled at him. Maybe it was for Alice’s benefit as a reporting journalist, but she didn’t think so. Bobby was a curious fellow, famous for killing undead things that were once US citizens, but strangely respectful. The official line on Yosemite hunting was that it was about population control, like deer hunting, but most of the people who contacted Alice through her blog argued that it was sadistic, macho bullshit: killing made legal so psychopaths could finally come out and play. But she didn’t think that was true of Bobby, even as sensational and famous as Sherman Pope had made him. He played the game with respect. And for that, Alice found her already entrenched regard for Bobby deepening.
By the time they piled back into the troop carrier recreational vehicle, the sun was setting. Bobby reclaimed his position on the roof for the ride back to the outpost, and Alice joined him. He seemed almost wistful, his deep-blue eyes watching the passing scenery like a sailor staring out at the sea.
She waited for him to speak first, not wanting to break the mood. In the between time, her mind moved to the vehicle below, and the landscape around them. Colonel Calais and the PFC who’d equipped her had said there were all sorts of control systems and safeguards observing the reserve: cameras everywhere linked by a rudimentary, experimental AI hub to follow and predict movements, tags like the one in her hand meant to keep watch on the movement of inmates both dead and alive, satellites in the sky watching for rogues here like the satellite network kept an eye on the nation’s cities and farmland.
But despite all of that — despite assurances that even if Alice somehow became separated from Bobby’s crew, there were armed rangers always at the ready who’d storm in to save her — Alice couldn’t help thinking of the vehicle, its rubber tires, its gas tank with a finite capacity, its engine that was as susceptible to breakdown as her own temperamental Prius X. They were perhaps a half hour from twilight, an hour from full dark. And no matter what safeguards existed, this wasn’t a place Alice wanted to be when light fled the sky.
“So,” said Bobby. “Did you get what you needed?”
Alice blinked, her thoughts slow to return from the horrors of a monster-filled darkness.
“For this part, yes. But we still have the interview.”
“How will it be different from the other interviews we’ve done?” Bobby wasn’t annoyed. His charming smile was back, his expression bright in the waning light. Despite being covered in guts, he remained camera friendly. He had two days’ stubble on his face and wavy brown hair that was too long for Alice’s taste but still worked well on the handsome Bobby Baltimore.
“Now I’ve been hunting with you.”
“And how was it?”
“Gruesome.”
“So then,” said Bobby. “What kinds of questions do you have for our interview?”
A parade of inquiries marched through her mind. She was as eager to ask as he was to know:
Do you ever wonder if people tune in and watch you blow away their family members? If so, does it bother you?
Have you ever interacted with a deadhead who hadn’t yet raged, who might still seem harmless, like a slow human?
How interested is Hemisphere in what they do here? Is it a testing ground, or something else?
Who is Golem, and what does he mean to you?
And perhaps most niggling of all: Does it strike you as conflicted that some of the staff here at Yosemite Reserve, where deadheads are hunted, are themselves Sherman Pope positive?
“I can’t tell you that,” Alice said. “It will give you time to prepare. I need a genuine reaction, when I ask my questions on the record.”
“Shock reporting? Corne
ring the interview subject? I thought you were better than that, Ms. Frank,” he said with a winning smile to blanch the sting. Another lighthearted jibe, as expected from a guy like Bobby, who could get away with anything.
“Nothing so sinister. But if you answer me now and I’m not recording, the little details will all be lost, and you may not give them again later, when they matter.”
“Fine. Spoilsport.” He looked into the distance, where moaning noises seemed to come from the rocks themselves. Alice had heard that: In areas with large feral populations (and these days, there were really only two left: Yosemite and Bakersfield), undead groans were as much a part of the aural landscape as chirping crickets or hooting owls. “Then tell me this: Will Archibald Burgess like the report you’ll give about this little trip, or will he hate it?”
The man who saved the world? The hero who came to the rescue when all seemed lost? That was the official line on Burgess, but Alice had a few rather unpopular opinions to the contrary. There was no question Hemisphere was all too aware of her thoughts, and Alice Frank’s fly in their ointment.
“Archibald Burgess,” Alice said, finally feeling less uneasy and more herself as the well-lit tree house outpost loomed ahead. “Yes, Bobby. Let’s talk about him.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DEAD CITY
“I’M JUST SAYING,” TED DOYLE said from across the table, “I’d still do her.”
Ian laughed. He wasn’t supposed to think that was funny, but hell if it wasn’t. The official Hemisphere stance on SP-positive individuals — casually termed “necrotics” but more unfortunately known as “twitchers” — was to act like nobody knew who had the disease and who didn’t. More realistically, the polite stance was to treat affliction like any other handicap or condition — hopefully with respect and understanding, albeit with some resistance. But in practice, most people were like Ted … and, Ian thought, like himself if he’d laughed. Nobody afflicted wanted the disease, and they surely weren’t to blame, but that didn’t change the fact that only four years ago, anyone infected for long enough would eventually try to eat you.