by Ben Tripp
“Shirleen’s got a feeling again,” said Crawford, an older man with a big, grizzled mustache. The Tribe had found him holed up in a sporting goods store back in Colorado. He could do anything outdoorsy.
“Remember that Shirleen is mentally ill,” Danny observed. “I got the kidnapper in my hold, but I don’t want anything to happen to him, you understand? He’s my prisoner.”
“We should hang him,” Crawford said. “Hang him with a sign to warn the next one comes along.”
There was a great deal of anger floating around over the situation with the kids. Danny herself had to compartmentalize it; they were constantly losing children one way or another, and kidnappers weren’t strategically worse than zeroes or disease. To think so was a distraction.
“He’s just a symptom,” Danny said. “It’s a bigger problem than that. Hang on, we need to debrief.”
Danny opened the rear door and dragged the man out. Now that he was back where he’d made his attempt at kidnapping, confronting his victims, there was no defiance left in him. He was meek and afraid, his shoulders sagging. She steered him to the rear of the motor home, where there was a ladder to the roof. She took the steel handcuffs off her belt and manacled his right arm to the ladder, then cut the zip-tie binding his hands with her hunting knife.
“Be right back,” she said, and strode away to confer with the parents of the child who had escaped kidnapping. They needed to know the situation was officially handled.
A number of onlookers gathered around the prisoner while she had her back turned, and there was some ugly noise rising among them. Danny came back in time to overhear a couple of men making plans that would be fatal to the “fucking kidnapping bastard.” She needed to make her ward seem a little more human, fast, or she would have to post a guard to keep him from getting lynched.
“What’s your name?” she asked, loudly enough to be heard by the others.
“M-Mike. Mike Patterson,” the man said.
“I’m Sheriff Adelman, Mike. And these here are my people. We’re one big team. We look out for each other. If I say ‘don’t kill you,’ they won’t. But if I decide you fucked up too bad to live, I don’t have to say shit. They’ll take care of business without me needing to ask. Are we clear?”
“You can’t just kill me. That would be murder.” Mike was pale now, the gash on his brow as vivid as a torch singer’s lips.
“Tell it to the judge,” Danny said, and then turned to her companions. “Nobody touches him, understood? He thought he was doing himself and the kid a favor. He heard the rumor about the safe place, and somebody else stole his kid. I think the safe place is bullshit, but Mike believed it enough to risk ending up just like this here.”
Crawford advanced through the crowd. “He won’t be the last, Sheriff. We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this. We need to send a message.”
Danny looked at him in mild disbelief, then called his bluff, offering him her knife handle-first. “Then kill him. Go ahead. I gotta take care of the Leper.”
Crawford just stood there. Nobody could quite make eye contact with Danny.
“Where’s Amy?” she said, when she judged enough silence had gone by. “Mike Patterson here’s got a broken foot. Somebody make sure she looks at it.”
Danny walked away. Nobody would kill Mike now, she thought. He was human again. At the thought, her eyes slipped over to the interceptor, inside which the Leper was sitting very still.
• • •
Topper returned to the site before Ernie and Conn. He’d had difficulty getting radio reception, so his arrival with the kid on his bike was unexpected. As always, anxious eyes searched along the direction he’d come from, looking for the other scouts. People had a way of disappearing all the time these days. See you later, then never see you again. Topper handed the kid to Maria; she was mother hen to the small ones. Another child to fuss over might make up for the black eye.
“I found this kid about ten miles along. Nobody else around. I think everybody except him got chewed and he’s all that’s left. Check this out,” Topper added, and opened the fiberglass pannier on the side of his bike.
The weird little dog looked out, eyes bugging at the unaccustomed crowd of people around him. Danny had been out in the fields with the Leper, cleaning her up; they did everything at a distance for privacy’s sake. Now she was coming back, although the Leper remained where she stood in the swaying grass. People were willing to put up with her presence, but only barely. She had to stay well apart, and even then, there were always eyes on her.
“Who’s this?” Danny asked, when she saw the kid.
“He don’t talk,” Topper said.
“Silent kid, huh?” Danny pronounced. “I like ’em that way. What the hell kind of dog is that?”
“It’s his,” Topper said. “I never seen one like it.”
“It’s a Boston Terrier,” Amy Cutter said, coming around from behind the White Whale. “Smallest of the bulldogs. A miniature breed, unlike the French or English Bulldogs, which are dwarf breeds. Mike’s foot isn’t broken, by the way; it’s sprained. Did you make the cut on his head?”
“Do I carry a machete?”
“In your car, you have one,” Amy said, kneeling.
The dog seemed to know she was an ally, because he immediately hopped out of the pannier and bounced up and down in front of her.
“Well I didn’t cut him,” Danny grumped. She often found herself bickering with Amy the same way they did as young girls. It was ridiculous, irritating, and comforting at the same time.
“Thanks for not smashing Mike too bad, Danny,” Amy said. “He’s scared out of his brain.”
Amy gave the dog a quick examination out of old habit, checking ears, eyes, and abdomen; although she was the Tribe’s doctor, Amy had been a veterinarian in the time before. Her straightforward brand of medicine was ideal for the life they led: She could set bones, stitch wounds, and sling antiseptic; she could do surgery in the back of a pickup truck. If somebody had cancer or a chronic illness, those were problems for God.
The dog inspected, Amy then examined the boy in much the same way: She soon determined he was suffering from ringworm and malnutrition. Amy was good with kids. They seemed to understand her better than a lot of adults did.
“You sure don’t talk much,” Amy said.
The silent kid said nothing.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, the remaining scouts came back: Ernie and Conn had gone on another thirty miles down the highway, with a detour down a southward fork that ended in a burning town they couldn’t possibly get through, unless they waited for it to burn out. It looked like Mike’s biker gang, the Vandal Reapers, had gone through that way. There were a lot of fresh corpses, some of them reanimated, the bodies hacked and shot. The Tribe could go straight on or straight back, and the rumors were true: The zeroes got real thick after mile twenty in the easterly direction.
“There’s a big old truck stop about halfway,” Ernie explained, mopping the grease off his spectacles with a blackened handkerchief. “There’s a crossroads there, route goes north-south, but the fire closed the south end. We saw some travelers on foot, regular folk it looked like, coming the other way, but they bugged out when they saw us.”
“So we got this kid,” Danny said. “And a kidnapper. There’s zeroes to the east and fire to the south. Marauders to the north. This party never ends. Okay,” she barked, turning to face the main group, “we roll out at sundown, people. Let’s get to the truck stop, and then we’ll see if we can locate a route around the swarm and keep going east. If not, we backtrack three days. I’m going to do a little recon before dark. Now, can somebody figure out why the fuck our radios don’t work?”
“I’m on it,” came a response from the crowd.
Danny turned to the silent kid, who hovered not far away, his dog at his ankle. He reminded Danny of her sister Kelley when she was that age, big-eyed and quiet, worried.
“I’m gonna
keep you safe, you understand? That’s a promise,” she said.
By way of reply, the boy raised his arm and pointed an accusatory finger at the crooked outline of the Leper. Danny bounced her damaged hand against her thigh, framing a response.
“That . . . that’s my kid sister,” Danny said. “Guess you figured out what’s wrong with her. She doesn’t bite, okay? I promised I’d keep you safe. She will not hurt you.”
The kid lowered his arm. But like so many of the others in the Tribe, he didn’t take his eyes off the Leper, either.
6
“Recon” wasn’t in fact what Danny had in mind. She simply didn’t want to discuss the real nature of the mission: It was time to take the Leper on a feeding trip.
For twenty minutes Danny drove through open country, then the fringes of a settlement, slowing down when they entered a light industrial area not far from the husk of a medium-sized town. A dead end by road, but with railway lines running through it.
“What are you in the mood for? Rats?” Danny said, as they rolled past shuttered repair shops, auto parts distributors, and warehouses.
“It’s not funny,” the Leper said, drawing breath for the purpose.
“You never did have a sense of humor, Kelley.”
“Or maybe you were never funny. Do you know what rats taste like?”
They pulled up in front of a ransacked food distribution center beside the railway tracks. The place had been thoroughly trashed by survivors looking for sustenance. As much had been trampled underfoot as carried away. There was a lot of rotten garbage strewn around in front of the yawning warehouse doors.
And there were plenty of rats.
The vermin population had exploded since the outbreak. Most species except man were making a comeback, especially those that thrived on human detritus. There were millions of tons of hermetically sealed food out there, even after the better part of two years. Cheetos would be available for decades, entombed in airtight plastic. Most of all, two hundred million human corpses made a ready supply of protein. Rats and cockroaches and flies had inherited the Earth.
“I hate it,” Kelley said.
“I ate a two-year-old candy bar the other day,” Danny said. “It had turned white.”
“No, I mean not just the rats. All of it. I’m coming apart, Danny. I’m peeling and rotting. Imagine you can’t heal. Every little scrape.” She filled her lungs again. “The skin on my fingers is worn almost completely off, and there’s stuff showing through underneath. My gums are just rags. I can feel parts of the bone in back—I can feel where my teeth go into the bone.”
“Wish it wasn’t like this,” Danny said, knowing it was a feeble response.
“I’m the picture of Dorian Gray.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Danny admitted.
She waited while Kelley stepped carefully out of the interceptor. She had to move cautiously—her flesh was vulnerable.
“Go somewhere else,” Kelley said. “The rats are afraid of the car.”
“Good hunting.”
She was already crossing the littered street.
“I’ll see you in an hour and a half or so,” Danny replied. “Be here, okay? Sundown is coming.”
Danny watched as the bandaged woman lay down in the midst of the garbage in front of the food warehouse. The rats would smell death. They would come swarming. And Kelley would feast on them once they got too close. Danny had learned a great deal about the undead through her sister; she was one of them, a thinker, the intelligent variety.
Kelley had died in Danny’s arms and come back different from the rest of the undead. She remained the person she had been, mostly. Danny had almost blown her sister’s brains all over the farmhouse they had taken shelter in. If she had, she might have blown her own brains out, too. But Kelley had spoken. I’m still me, she’d said. And a pick of ice had been thrust down the center of Danny’s brain that was as cold and sharp today as in that moment. She would never forget the horror of that. It had been seasoned by hope, somehow. Some crazy idea that the dead might not always be lost.
But Kelley was lost. She had returned with her memories, the record of her life, intact inside her mind. Just as her body was decaying, those things that had been hers were fading by degrees. Sometimes Danny thought she should have pulled the trigger. But she hadn’t, and Kelley was now her constant responsibility. It was the price she paid for being a crappy sister, and for putting the Tribe at risk to go find her. Someday Kelley might attack Danny, or kill someone else in the Tribe. It was possible. They talked about it. But Danny didn’t think so. Kelley had made some grim calculation and decided not to eat the flesh of men. She had never wavered, at least so far.
The Tribe didn’t like it at all. Most of the small children didn’t know the truth; the name “Leper” had stuck because it was the only way to explain the concealing bandages. It took new people a few days to realize what Kelley was, and most of the folks who hitched a ride for a couple of days never knew how close they came to a specimen of their worst nightmares. The thinkers they’d encountered were deadly. They could use weapons, lay traps, and make complex plans. They sometimes worked with hunters, the undead who had animal-like intelligence, using them almost like dog packs; the moaners, the stupid ones, were useless to them. But the moaners also seemed to fear the thinkers, and that’s why Kelley was allowed to exist alongside the Tribe.
Moaners wouldn’t come anywhere near her. They had superb senses of smell: Even the most rotten walking corpse would have fresh-looking tissue in its sinuses. Not pink, but marbled and purple. But it was vital flesh, sometimes so enlarged it bulged out of the nostrils or the hole where the nose used to be. The ones that came shambling toward the Tribe’s halting places, though, would smell Kelley and immediately back off. Their incessant moaning would stop. They would slouch away and disappear into the landscape. The hunters were a little more persistent, and might circle a campsite all night, but they’d never come close. It was almost worth the price of having a thinker around. Almost.
This aversion to the scent of thinkers was why Danny escorted Kelley through a few tours of the perimeter wherever the Tribe had halted—the residual smell usually kept the stupider types away, as long as it wasn’t windy. It was the same reason she guided her sister away from safety when it was time to change her diapers and clean up the spongy, half-rotten skin around her genitals. Danny always buried the baby wipes and diapers in the place she thought most likely to facilitate an attack. They worked better than land mines on the zeroes.
But Danny knew that her people were only waiting for the other shoe to drop. As if Kelley had some diabolical plan to kill them all and eat their guts. Every day, Danny spent a lot of her leadership capital ensuring her sister was safe from destruction by the living. That was one reason she took big risks: it was a show of fearlessness to remind them all who had their back. It kept the balance sheet firmly in her favor. If Danny wanted Kelley around, there must be a good reason: that was the message she wanted them to get. On an average day, she guessed they about half-believed it. Kelley wasn’t dangerous—she craved human flesh all the time, but had never actually tasted it.
Danny had lost her sister once. She didn’t intend to lose her again. Ever.
• • •
She drove aimlessly through the twilight. As long as Danny stayed in the vehicle, she didn’t have much to fear from the undead; it reeked of her sister. But another thinker wouldn’t hesitate to attack. They didn’t fear each other. The Tribe had even found evidence of thinker teams destroying each other. She turned on the headlights and saw a kind of View-Master slide presentation of the apocalypse in exaggerated 3-D. Wrecked cars, burned-out structures, white femurs and rib cages winking out from beneath cars or strewn across the pavement. Sometimes a gallows figure crawling away, clothed in rags and filth. She drove until she came to a low hill, bare of trees or bushes; the entire hilltop had been flattened and paved a long time back, for what purpose Danny couldn’t imag
ine.
She parked at the margin of the paved area in a position that gave her a good view of the landscape below: a town, completely dark and silent, the last of the daylight spread as thin as watercolor on the rooftops. Kelley was hunting on the opposite side of the hill where the uglier businesses had been built, away from the quaint charm of downtown. Danny thought to look at the map and find out what this place used to be called, but it didn’t make any difference. Call it Deadville.
She had her elbow out of the open window, relishing the ice-cold air; if anything wanted to attack, she’d hear its feet on the broken pavement. So it was that she felt the sound before she heard it. The door panel was vibrating under her arm. She pressed her one finger against it and felt the rumbling in the sheet metal. Then the sound reached her ears: engines. A lot of engines, very far away. Was it the Tribe? Could they have come after her, for some reason? But no; they’d be on the other side of the hill. This sound was coming from outside the town. She permitted herself another minute of listening, until she was certain: motorcycles. A lot of them. It sounded like early morning on Bike Day back in Forest Peak, when the Harleys started coming in big groups up the mountain roads, audible ten minutes before they came into view.
Is it the Vandal Reapers? Danny wondered. Maybe not worth finding out.
Then there were gunshots—some single, some rapid-fire, punctuating the rise of the engine sounds. She dropped the interceptor into neutral and rolled backward away from the rim of the hill, lights out. Then she turned around and drove down the road she’d come up, maintaining darkness until she was among buildings at the bottom of the hill. She had to be sure she wouldn’t light up the sky. Artificial illumination caught the eye in these times.
It took her half an hour to backtrack to the place she’d left Kelley to feed. She wasn’t there.
Danny honked the horn a couple of times, then zipped up her jacket and retrieved the snub-barreled shotgun from the passenger foot well. Best not to remain in the vehicle in case it attracted unwanted attention. She checked the immediate area outside the warehouse for signs of other zeroes, then ran across the truck lot to a security booth. There wasn’t any glass in the windows, but it would protect her from a rush, at least. She waited. After a couple of minutes that felt like days, Danny saw something move on the far side of the rubbish piled up outside the warehouse. It might have been Kelley. She waited, holding her breath. The light was poor. But she saw it again: a distinct human figure, hunched over, moving between the buildings. Then it was out of view.