by Ben Tripp
“You look like alligator balls. I’m asking you, go back and tell the chooks to saddle up and get closer. We might find a way to punch through the swarm, and they don’t want to be too far away if we do. This is a highly dynamic situation.”
Danny was aware she was giving both men a lot more choice in the matter than she would have in the past. They seemed a little put off by it, like they didn’t know what to do. But she couldn’t make every decision. She needed these two to start doing more of it, so she could focus on her own tasks. And she was sure those children were somewhere directly down the railway line. Her instincts told her this was the trail.
“I’ll go north,” Topper said, much to Danny’s gratification. “Conn, you get back to the Tribe. Sheriff, good fuckin’ luck.”
Kelley took her time getting into the car; Danny had to choke back a complaint. There was no criticizing the undead. They simply did not give a shit.
Danny hit the gas, tore the legs off a zero in the entrance to the parking lot with the cable overrider on the bumper, and drove hell-for-leather alongside the railroad tracks, racing due east.
15
The swarm simply vanished a few kilometers farther down the track. The zeroes got so dense it was almost as bad as the interstate—and then there were a lot of fallen ones, rotten, sprawling everywhere, and none standing, and for whatever reason after that there were just empty shells of buildings, and fields and prairie glinting with naked bones. Danny stopped the interceptor. Whenever something major changed, it was time to take stock, as much as she wanted to rush ahead. Ten minutes, then back on the road. She turned to Kelley, who was hunched silently against her door, arms folded tightly across her belly.
“I’m going to climb up that grain silo over there and see what there is,” Danny said.
No response, which Danny interpreted to be affirmative.
Danny backed up until she crossed a farm road that went over the railroad tracks, and a couple of minutes later the interceptor was parked in the shadow of a corrugated steel warehouse used to transfer grain into train cars that would never come. Rats everywhere.
“You hungry?” Danny said.
“Fuck you,” Kelley said.
“Looks like an all-you-can-eat buffet. See you in ten.”
Danny headed for the silo. She glanced back once and saw Kelley scowling out the window of the interceptor, eyes fixed on the rats scurrying everywhere through the debris.
• • •
Atop the silo’s gerbil cage ladder, Danny scanned the horizon with her binoculars, her crippled hand aching from the climb. The sun was getting low. Lately the days seemed not so much to pass, but to leak out of the world. The wind, she noticed, was at her back again—west to east. So the radio might work. But she didn’t have anything to report just yet.
Wait. There was a stationary train on the tracks a couple of kilometers away. She focused on that. The sun was beginning to reflect off the roofs of the cars in such a way that she could see the train wasn’t as straight as it should have been. It looked like a derailment, in fact.
Was that the vibration she’d felt on the rails? But it couldn’t be—the rails here didn’t shine. If the train had been running recently, there wouldn’t be rust on the tracks; they’d be bright as chrome. That film of rust meant the derailed train in her binoculars was the end of the line for anyone coming this way. The pieces fell into place in her head: two dead trains on the same track, twenty or thirty kilometers apart. So no through traffic. But trains could use the track to the east—for how far, she didn’t know. Could be ten kilometers, could be two thousand. Whatever was making the rails vibrate, it was on the other side of this wreck.
Still, where would a pack of kidnapping zeroes be going, anyway? They could stop anywhere and eat the cargo at their leisure. There must be some greater goal. It was impossible to guess. Danny stared through her binoculars as if the answer was written on the train cars.
The train, now that she thought about it, looked familiar. It reminded Danny of the one she’d seen a year back in a small California town, abandoned by paramilitary contractors. Engine and cars painted in some kind of blocky digital camouflage. Not all of them, just the ones in front. The middle of the train was cylinder cars of some kind, gasoline or liquid nitrogen or (most likely, in this region) corn syrup. Several of these had come clean off the rails and were scattered around beside the tracks, burned black. There was a big delta of gray, dead vegetation—not simply brown, but scorched—spreading to the south away from the train. Some of the tanker cars must have burned. Danny saw a couple of fire trucks on the road by the tracks; they had given up in a hurry for some reason. Probably zeroes. There were skeletal human remains scattered everywhere.
Then she saw the symbol.
It was a big decal on one of the charred tanker cars. Its colors were mostly roasted away, so she didn’t recognize it at first, but there was no mistaking it once she understood: radiation. Three wedge-shaped segments converging on a circular center. Vestiges of black and yellow. The car itself had split across its belly, and dull cylinders like egg cases had fallen through the twisted metal. The ground around them was ebonized.
Danny climbed back down as fast as she could, her mutilated hand slipping on the rungs of the ladder, and returned to the interceptor.
“We need to get out of here,” she barked at Kelley, who had succumbed to her hunger. She was crouching over the mangled remains of several rats, shoveling bloody scraps into her mouth.
Thirty seconds later Danny was driving them away from the wreck as fast as she dared go—the moaners were thick on the road. But there had been none anywhere near the wreck. That had to mean something. Plenty of corpses, but no zeroes.
“Drink some water,” she said to Kelley, and shoved a bottle into the gloved hands. Her sister didn’t so much drink as pour it down the inside of her neck—she never swallowed—but the water seemed to metabolize and keep her from developing that intense dried-fish smell that reminded Danny that she was an animated corpse. They’d tried perfume, once. It was worse. This time, though, it was the smell of rat guts in Kelley’s teeth that Danny sought to dilute.
“What did you see?” Kelley said, and belched like a raven croaking. It stank cruelly.
“There’s a train wreck back there. So whoever we heard riding the rails, they must have gone around north and then hooked down well east of here. This is a hot zone.”
“I don’t feel hot or cold.”
“Radioactive hot zone. You remember what radiation is, right? Invisible death? Looks to me like the train was thrown together to move some nuclear fuel or something . . . but they had an accident. Busted open the container and there was a big spill. We need to get away from here in case the wind shifts again. I don’t know what it will do to you, but I know what it’ll do to me.”
“I know where we are,” Kelley said, after a while.
“Southwest Nebraska?”
“I mean this train wreck. I heard about it.”
“From your thinker buddies?”
“I’m still hungry.”
Danny still couldn’t get out of her head that ghostly figure she’d spotted in Kelley’s feeding ground. She wanted to ask a hundred questions, demand answers. But further exploration would probably be a waste of time. Kelley only said what she wanted to, and always had. In life she had been a fluent liar. It was a cosmic irony that the unforthcoming girl had only been rehearsing for her role as an even less forthcoming zero.
“You’re putting everybody in danger,” Danny said. “You need to tell me what you know.”
“I told you, I heard of this place. Radiation kills my kind instantly if it’s close by. There you go. That’s all I know.”
“And that doesn’t scare you? If the wind had changed, you’d be—”
“I’d be what? Killed?”
Danny couldn’t think of anything else to say. Kelley kneaded her belly and belched and stank.
• • •
Danny stayed on the old side road for a while on her way to rejoin the Tribe. She needed to think. And part of her, as always, was hoping to find some scrap of normality hidden away somewhere. She’d have given a year of her life to drive past a working 7-11 with the sign lit up, lottery tickets on the counter, those nasty hot dogs rolling in their cooker, racks of chips and snacks, Slim Jims, cold soft drinks, crappy Top 40 music coming from the ceiling. Surely there must be such a place. Just one, somewhere in the almost four million square miles of America. But it didn’t have to be as slickly packaged as that. A big working farm would do. One where the hands didn’t have to plant fast in small areas, the zeroes coming toward them, and then leave for a few months, coming back only to see if anything took hold. A school would be nice, too. With clean kids and teachers who didn’t have automatic weapons on their backs.
She was halfway back to the interstate when the radio crackled on.
“Come in, Sheriff,” Topper said through a web of static.
“Read you,” Danny replied into the handset.
“I got some news, where are you?”
“Okay for radio?”
“Let’s meet.”
• • •
They joined up at a burned-out filling station that had been destroyed in the early days of the crisis. Danny could tell this because the sign in front displayed gas prices in the five-dollar range. By the time things had been in chaos for a week, prices per gallon were fifty dollars and up. After two weeks, gas was free if you could pump it.
Kelley stayed in the interceptor, holding her head down low like she was trying not to vomit. Danny retrieved a pint bottle from the trunk and offered Topper a pull. It was Southern Comfort, sweet and awful. Just something to ward off the chill in the air. There didn’t seem to be any moaners around. Danny signaled for Kelley to lower her window, just in case there were hunters or thinkers nearby.
“I found a radioactive train wreck,” Danny began, as soon as Topper’s engine stopped rumbling. “That’s why the swarm is built up, I think. They can’t get past the hot area. Radiation drops ’em. What have you got?”
“I found the Chevelle.”
Danny was rocked back by this. Without thinking, she hooked Topper’s lapel with her damaged hand and pulled him closer.
“You found the vehicle, but no kids? No kidnappers?”
“Easy there, Sheriff,” Topper said, and disengaged her finger and thumb. “I found the truck, too. Medium-duty two-ton diesel job. The back smelled like people, you know? Like dirty skin and pee. Padlock on the outside of the cargo door. But nobody around.”
He unfolded a map from inside his vest and stabbed a thick finger at the route. “Check it out: I went north and found a road east, like we figured. Hardly any zeroes. Couple few miles I take that road. Then I seen the Chevelle, parked next to a fuckin’ saloon like the driver gone in for a fuckin’ beer. And up an alley there’s the truck. I did some ninja scouting and didn’t see nobody around. Then down the road a piece I seen this wreck. Three cars, all the way across from one guardrail to the other.”
“Go back to the Chevelle. Tell me—”
“Hear me out, Sheriff. These cars was put there on purpose to block the road, because ain’t any debris on the ground and they ain’t tangled together. Just kind of piled up.”
“So can we clear the way and get through? That’s perfect. No swarm.”
“Ain’t as simple as that. This here’s why I didn’t want to talk on the radio. I didn’t want ’em to overhear us. See, the road don’t go that far east. After a piece it hooks down to a train station on that same railway line. It ain’t a passenger station, more like a freight depot. Ain’t on the map so it must be private property. But here’s the fuckin’ kicker: It got lights, power, radio aerials, bobwire, the whole bit. And there’s armed motherfuckers on the roof. Whole place is staffed up and secured. Trains, man. Somebody’s running trains.”
Hot damn, Danny thought. Something new.
“Did they see you? Hear you?”
“Hell no. When I saw the wrecked cars, I thought right away they didn’t look natural, so I hid my bike and did the rest of the recon on foot. Thought it might have been an ambush.”
“And you didn’t call me.”
“Didn’t want to risk it.”
Danny nodded. She was impressed by Topper’s handling of the situation—so impressed she almost mentioned it. But she didn’t.
“How many men?”
“Maybe eight or nine, maybe more. There’s a few buildings. No zeroes around.”
So her working hypothesis should be right: The kidnappers escaped by train. But if there were men at the depot, how had the zeroes gotten aboard the train? Maybe they weren’t zeroes at all. Maybe the horror at the ranch was just a coincidence, and they’d been chasing ordinary men who happened to stop somewhere where evil had occurred. God knew there were plenty of those places.
But something else was on Danny’s mind. She mulled it over. Topper stared off into the sky, occupied with his own thoughts.
“The station must be east of the radioactive zone,” Danny said, after a while. “Other side of the train wreck. And the perimeter of the zone is swarming with zeroes like we’ve never seen before. Like tens of thousands of the damn things. Right?”
“Yeah,” Topper said, unsure where she was going with the idea.
“So the safe place might really be safe. This might not be some urban legend bullshit. If there was a settlement that way, they wouldn’t have to worry about attack from this direction, because the zeroes aren’t going anywhere near the radiation. I watched them—the moaners are so damn stupid they’ll walk through boiling water, but they aren’t going anyplace near that stuff. Or they’re dropping as soon as they get near, which amounts to the same thing.”
“Okay,” Topper said. He was intrigued, but he couldn’t swallow the idea. “But you wouldn’t want to take a train ride through there, either.”
“Were the men you saw at the train station wearing protective gear?”
“No, just clothes. Nothing special. Civilian stuff.”
“No respirators, even?”
“No.”
“So,” Danny concluded, “probably the hot zone ends before then. Prevailing winds are north-south, so it makes sense. Take the train straight through the hot zone with the windows up, check the Geiger counter now and then, and after a few miles you’re in the clear.”
“It still don’t work,” Topper said, shaking his head like a boxer. “You’re the one figgered out them kidnappers is zeroes. The hell would zeroes want to get to the safe place for? Hell, they’re fuckin’ thinkers. Everywhere is their safe place, except human settlements. If there’s a safe place, people would kill ’em on sight.”
“Maybe they figured out how to pass for living. Maybe they didn’t take the train at all. They could be walking overland. There would be no danger from other zeroes.”
“In other words,” Topper said, “our kids got stole by some fuckers who might of took a train, or they might of walked. And like that dude you captured said, the price to get into the safe place is one kid per person. So assuming they ain’t zeroes, they’re going to use them kids as tickets. Assuming they are, they’re just packing lunch.”
“That’s how I see it.”
“Then I say we go the fuck after them right now,” Topper said, slapping his hands together. “Maybe hold those pricks at the station at gunpoint and get some answers. We could even make ’em stop the train. Then we light out and wreak vengeance on the kidnappers, old-school.”
Danny laughed. “You sound like me, Topper.”
“Your kind of bullshit rubs off on people after a while.”
Danny made a sudden feint and play-punched Topper in his belly—a play-punch that would have knocked him down if she’d connected it. He was so surprised he laughed, too. For a moment, they both felt like normal people. He put his big hand on her shoulder and they both laughed, him like a bullfrog, her like a crow.
Kelley emerged from the interceptor and watched them. The mood drained out of the moment with that hungry presence hovering nearby.
“We do this by the book,” Danny said. “If they’re on a train, they can outrun us but we know where they’re going to, and if they’re on foot, we can catch up to them. So let’s go back and get the Tribe settled somewhere it can stay till we get back: check real good for traps, maybe leave Kelley out on the perimeter to keep the moaners and hunters at bay. Then we book it across that empty zone and get the kids back.”
Topper threw his leg over his bike and fired the engine, then switched it off again. There was more to be said; he was trying to piece it together in his mind.
“There’s something we ain’t thinking about. If this here train goes to the safe place, the whole fuckin’ Tribe is gonna want to get aboard. Probably hand over all the kids. That’s gonna be the end of this thing we been doing. This whole kind of journey we been on.”
“Good,” Danny said, with feeling. “I’ve had enough of it.”
“What happens if we get there and they already got our stolen kids?”
“We tell them whose kids they are. Sort that shit right out.”
“I hope it’s that fuckin’ simple,” Topper said, and restarted the bike.
Danny didn’t reply. Hope won’t do it, she thought, but it didn’t bear saying out loud. Her hopes had resulted in the undead thing that stood nearby, snuffling at the air, yearning for fresh meat.
16
The smoke rose lazily from a late-model station wagon that had been hit by what looked very much like a rocket-propelled grenade. It had blown the rear axle off; one of the tires was still burning. It reminded Danny of her beloved vintage Mustang, which had been similarly destroyed, although by a more powerful weapon. There was a fresh corpse on the road surface next to the car, a woman. It was clear that she had suffered before she died; her jeans were wrapped around one ankle and her shirt had been torn open, exposing pale white breasts. Her skull had been split from ear to ear by an axe or a machete. Danny felt the sting of bile in the back of her throat as she made a circuit of the scene, shotgun at the ready. Topper stayed on his bike, rifle across the handlebars. He kept his eyes on the scenery, looking for ambush.