by Ben Tripp
Even before they’d reached the place, Kelley had been inhaling deeply, smelling the fresh blood. That had made Danny queasy enough. Seeing what made her sister’s animated remains hungry was more than she could take. She spat a few times, and put her hands on her knees with her head down, and was able to master the sickness. But she never stopped listening for the sound of engines.
“Looks like we missed the party by ten minutes,” Topper said. “The body is still steaming.”
Danny retched.
“Thanks, Topper,” she managed to say. “Let’s not talk about it.”
Danny wondered what this woman had been doing, traveling alone out here in the heart of nowhere. Nobody went alone, except the Silent Kid. Then she worked her way around to the far side of the station wagon, and the question was answered. There was a zero. A fresh kill, reanimated only a short while. A moaner now, but recently a man about the same age as the dead woman; there was red blood all over his clothes, and black blood flowing from his jaws. He hissed and snapped at Danny, but didn’t attack. He couldn’t—he had been shot with an arrow, and it had gone through his back and stuck into the car door.
Danny watched as the thing laboriously pulled itself along the length of the exposed arrow shaft, its grief and terror forgotten, only hungry. This is how Kelley feels, every second of every day, Danny thought. But she doesn’t attack. She’s stronger than me.
If Danny came back, even as a thinker, she knew damn well she’d eat the hell out of the first living person that came along. She didn’t flatter herself. She’d probably rip Amy Cutter’s head off and eat it, marshmallows and all. But Kelley was sitting there in the vehicle right this moment, with a feast of fresh meat in front of her, and hadn’t so much as turned her head when Danny opened the door. Her sister had always been strong-willed, but this was something more than that. If she was like this in death, Danny had sorely misjudged her in life.
“What is it?” Topper called. He couldn’t see the zero.
Danny was about to squeeze the trigger when she recalled that the attackers might not be far away. Just because they hadn’t come running at the sound of a Harley didn’t mean they wouldn’t hear a gunshot. She picked up a broken stave of wood from a knocked-down signpost, jabbed it into the pinned zero’s eye, and then leaned forward until the head thumped against the car door and there was the double pop of bone and brain yielding.
Then she went around to the female corpse and dragged it off the road.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said, and didn’t bother to tell Topper about the arrow. They started their engines and hightailed it toward the interstate.
17
The Tribe was waiting on the interstate about halfway to the infested zone. Several zeroes had approached the convoy while it waited; they appeared to be headed for the swarm, driven by whatever inner sense guided them. The smoke of burning corpses drifted around them from the hasty funeral pyre that had been built in a field off the road to destroy the dead of the previous night. A couple of the undead stopped near the blaze, and seemed to stare at the fire, remembering. It was probably only the bright light that attracted them.
Wulf shot them down from atop the White Whale. The children, who were now kept together inside the RV while the Tribe was stationary, would put their fingers in their ears after each shot, but they didn’t think much about it. Gunfire was customary to them.
When Danny and Topper returned, the rest of the scouts were already there; she whistled up an assembly, and within a couple of minutes the entire Tribe had gathered around, some on the pavement and others standing on top of their vehicles. It was a battered-looking group, Danny observed. A lot of bandages and dirty faces, blood-crusted hair.
Danny wanted to get this over with and start the hunt, so she skipped the preamble.
“Listen up. Two things. First, there is a motorcycle gang operating in the area. They’re not friendlies. So we need to remain on high alert. Second thing: We have an idea of where the kids have been taken. They may be on the way to that safe place on the far side of the swarm. Whether that place is actually safe or not remains to be seen. I think it’s probably bullshit. So myself and the scouts are going to head over that way. If we can catch up, we’ll bring the kids back. If they get there first, we’ll scope out the situation and report what we find.”
“How far is it?” It was Crawford, the voice of doubt.
“I don’t know,” Danny said, trying to keep a lid on her irritation. “We’ll find out.”
“How do we get there?” a scraggly-haired woman said, unconsciously raising her hand. Danny didn’t know her name.
“Don’t know. The kidnappers might have taken a train. That’s what it seems like. We found an operational station about forty minutes northeast of here.”
Even as she spoke, Danny knew she’d made a mistake. There was a sudden alertness to the crowd; the word “train” seemed to have galvanized everyone. She hadn’t anticipated this. A buzz of voices threatened to drown the central discussion.
“A train?” Crawford repeated.
Topper broke in with his bullfrog voice: “They might be on the train or on foot. We don’t know yet.”
The scraggly woman stepped forward, her hand still raised. Now she was looking at the others around her. “If there’s a train, must be civilization, too. Need all kinds of stuff for a train.”
“You don’t,” Danny said. “This isn’t some magical good news, people. The sooner we can all get set up for a few days’ stay, the sooner me and the scouts can get moving.”
“Hell if you’re going alone this time,” Crawford said. “We’re all coming.”
The man to his right chimed in: “Ever time you leave, we get fucked over anyhows, so we all go.”
“There’s a damn train,” the scraggly woman interjected.
“Stand down,” Danny barked. The woman lowered her hands and a lot of the side conversations ceased. “Let us do our jobs. You all get yourselves set up safe, form a perimeter and set watches. We’ll report back in a couple of days.”
“Bullshit!” another man yelled from the back.
“How about I fuck you up, bitch,” Topper suggested.
“I don’t like where this is headed,” Crawford said, all of a sudden the reasonable one. “Isn’t this a democracy? Let’s choose who goes.”
Danny felt her face turning red. The situation was out of control. She was furious, but needed to hold it down. They’d use her anger against her.
She raised her voice just below a shout: “Hold on! We don’t know who is running that train, or why they’re running it. We are still alive today because we have an advance team. If everybody goes, we’re as likely to get the kids killed as anything else. Let us do our fucking jobs.” It sounded feeble to her, like whining. Apparently the dissenters thought so, too.
“They’re not your kids, they’re our kids!” a short woman with a bandaged head hollered.
Danny turned to Amy, who stood a little way behind her. Amy looked cornered. She even shrugged. “Thanks a lot,” Danny said.
“Danny, it’s too late,” Amy replied. She was correct: The crowd was breaking up. Already, several drivers had gone back to their vehicles, ready to roll out. More and more chooks were getting the message. They were pulling out, Danny’s orders be damned. The safe place was within reach.
Crawford approached her, stopping slightly beyond arm’s length. “Sheriff, you need to understand,” he said. “We might be at the dawn of a new era here. Don’t make us wait.”
“It’s your funeral,” Danny said, and raised the lone finger of her mutilated hand in what she meant to be an obscene gesture.
“Are we gonna let this chook prick dictate Tribe policy?!” Topper said, and addressing Crawford directly, added, “Shut your fuckin’ trap.” Conn, who had been watching silently, stepped up beside Topper. He wasn’t above beating somebody up if it would improve his mood.
“It’s too late,” Danny said, waving them
off. It was always too late.
As she turned on her heels, glaring around in frustration, a grim thought occurred to her. She turned back to Topper. “What did you say just now?”
The biker thought she was looking for a target to vent upon. “I didn’t say shit. Don’t take it out on me.”
“He told that fucker to shut his trap,” Conn interjected. “Good fuckin’ advice.”
“The only trap gonna shut,” Danny said, “is the one these assholes are driving into.”
Half of the convoy was already on the move, the vehicles forming up into their crooked line, heading for the exit off the interstate that led north. The air was pale with exhaust fumes. People were still piling into cars and trucks and herding their children into the White Whale. Danny’s heart was speeding up. That part of her mind that formed theories and plans of action had plenty to work with—she cursed herself for not seeing it sooner.
Most of the scouts had collected around her, looking for orders. This mutiny situation was new.
“Guys,” Danny said. “Guys! Vandal Reapers—they’ve been working this area. Why? Think about it. Chooks come through here looking for the safe place. We’ve seen them all over. Dragging their poor fucking kids along. There’s the train line and everything. It’s the promised land. And these sons of bitches nail them before they get close. Mouse cheese. I think it’s a goddamned trap.”
“We gotta stop these shitheads,” Topper said.
“They don’t know where the place is,” Conn pointed out.
Ernie chimed in: “Where is this place?”
“Not twenty miles from here,” Topper said. “It’s just about the only way to go. They’d find it by mistake. Sheriff, what do we do?”
Danny had been asking herself the same question. Kelley stood beside the interceptor a few meters away; as usual, people gave her a wide berth but otherwise ignored her. She wasn’t a part of this situation any more than a vicious dog would be. But now she raised her skeletal arm and extended a finger northward, and the scouts all turned to look at her.
“Stop them,” she said.
• • •
In ten minutes, the entire Tribe was on the secondary road leading toward the train depot. Thirty-five kilometers of wreckage and bad pavement. The first time in a while that the complete convoy had attempted to take a narrow route anywhere. It was a lesson often learned: never get into a tight place with a wide load. But these people had been driving to nowhere for almost two years. They had seen no specific progress except the ritualistic racking-up of mileage and a slow, aimless review of what was left of the great open spaces of the American West. If they had forgotten why keeping to the open spaces was a tactical decision, not everyone would blame them.
Danny did, however.
She, Kelley, and the scouts didn’t race for the front this time. After flagging down individual vehicles proved futile, they stood back and watched the Tribe go by. Danny was seriously wondering if the time had come to give up on the entire project. She made only one further attempt to intervene: As it rolled past, she tried to flag down the White Whale, biggest of the vehicles, to keep it from joining the general rush. Patrick was at the wheel. He called to her out of the driver’s window:
“We can’t stay behind anymore, Danny. Divided we fall. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s a trap, you dumb bastard,” Danny said.
“It’s a cookbook!” Patrick shouted, and Danny had no idea what he was talking about. Then, as he was rolling past, he added over his shoulder, “We have to stick together. I’m not leaving the kids sitting out here without the whole Tribe around us. And to be honest, I’m tired of you always leaving us.”
Maybe he is right, Danny thought. After all, the Vandals would attack half the Tribe standing still just as fast as they’d attack the other half moving. It was her instincts against everything else.
“Fuck it. We’ll take up the rear for once,” Danny said, and the scouts climbed aboard their bikes. “Stay off the radios!” she added, yelling above the thunder of engines. “Let’s not clue anybody in if they’re listening.” By the time she and Kelley were in the interceptor, most of the traffic had already passed by.
“No matter what goes down, stay in the car,” Danny said.
“We’re past the point of you trusting me.”
“We’re past the point of me covering your ass, Kelley. Stay in the car.”
• • •
They rumbled along in the stop-start fashion the convoy always did on smaller roads; somebody would hit the brakes and the entire enfilade would shudder to a crawl, then a bit of distance would open up and others would rush into the gap—only to repeat the process. The exhaust fumes at the back of the convoy were choking. This was the first time Danny had ever been in the rear guard, and she didn’t like it.
There was a halt when someone ran over a plank with nails in it. The tire change took ten years, in Danny’s estimation. She considered walking up the line and trying to talk individual drivers out of pursuing their quest, but by this time she was so angry about the situation she was almost reconciled to finding out what happened when she wasn’t in charge. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything would be fine. Maybe she was only paranoid. But she had a feeling they’d fuck it all up.
They passed through an area she remembered—up ahead was a big modernistic church opposite a slaughterhouse, with two liquor stores in a row right next door to the church. Huge parking lots followed by endless fields of weeds. The convoy slowed to a crawl and Topper pulled up next to Danny’s window.
“You sure you don’t want us up ahead? I don’t like this,” he said.
“What difference will it make?”
“None, I guess. But we should of stopped these fuckheads. We’re fifteen minutes from the place where that dead chick on the road is. Maybe that will slow ’em down.”
Topper rode on anyway, weaving in and out of the traffic for a while, then falling back behind the interceptor. Danny hoped the murder scene would make some of these idiots think—if not of their own safety, then of what the scouts saw every day. She glanced over at Kelley, who sat motionless, her head turned to look out the passenger window. Or, more likely, to exclude Danny from her field of view.
“You think this really is a trap?” Danny asked, not expecting much of a response.
“Yes,” Kelley said.
Kelley drew in a lungful of the exhaust-poisoned air, which meant nothing to her except as a medium to allow her to speak.
“What,” Danny said, when Kelley failed to say anything for the better part of a minute.
“There is one thing I didn’t tell you,” Kelley said, speaking with care, as if the words were made of thin glass. “It’s a secret. You keep grilling me about talking to one of my kind? He told me a secret on pain of destruction,” she continued.
“Tell me now.”
“And you won’t tell anybody?”
“Who the fuck am I going to tell?”
Kelley took a hesitant breath and sounded, for that moment, almost alive.
“One for you, twenty for me,” she said.
“What?” Danny didn’t understand, but the goose bumps suddenly breaking out all over her arms gave away her deep unease. “Is that a riddle?”
“One for you, twenty for me.”
“You need to tell me what the fuck that means,” Danny said, her head throbbing. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re in trouble,” Kelley said, and pointed ahead.
“Incoming!” a voice shouted on the radio.
The Vandal Reapers were upon them.
• • •
Immediately there was gunfire and smoke. The bikes came booming out from behind the church and the slaughterhouse, which were dead center of the convoy; this placed the White Whale and the children at the heart of the attack. The vast apron of tar around the buildings made for a broad maneuvering zone joined seamlessly with the road. It was a perfect setup.
Danny couldn’t see the a
ction at first. She heard the bikes roar as they started up, bleating and crackling; then there were voices on the radio and confusion and gunshots. She wanted desperately to move up the file, but at the back of the convoy the road was still narrow, with guardrails on one side and cow pens on the other. So she shoved her entire upper body out of the window and waved the scouts forward.
“Do what you can!” she shouted, and then turned the wheel over and scraped along the guardrail, squeezing past the vehicles ahead, ignoring the shocked faces pressed to their windows.
“Hand me the shotgun,” she said to Kelley.
Now she could see the fight. Most of the gang’s bikes had riders in tandem, the passenger firing into the line while the one at the handlebars maneuvered in close. In the initial panic, Tribe drivers were slamming on the brakes or trying to speed up, depending on what confronted them. Plastic and metal crunched; broken trim began to fly. Vehicles piled up and gaps in the line split open. The riders moved in, cutting the convoy into sections. They’d done this before.
The Vandal Reapers, Danny saw, had covered themselves in animal remains—bones, hides, gristle. These weren’t some Road Warrior disco renegades; they looked more like raiders from a prehistoric war. There wasn’t any exposed skin. Some of them had rotten deer legs slung over their backs like foul guitars; all of them carried an axe or a machete in addition to firearms. She glimpsed poxy skulls wired all over the triple trees and hung like party lanterns along the flanks of the bikes. Her impression was brief, but enough to know these weren’t some desperate outsiders trying to stay alive. These bikers had figured out how to make the end of the world into their finest hour.
• • •
Danny’s bad hand was on the window side, so she hooked her finger over the steering wheel and rested the shotgun in the crook of that arm. Almost the moment she got onto the wide part of the road, she had a clean shot; she blew the nearest bike over with a load of old-fashioned buckshot and saw the passenger’s face connect with the pavement. She’d hit the driver in the thigh, so he was out of action. Then the windshield frosted over on Kelley’s side—they’d taken a bullet through the glass, but it didn’t appear Kelley was hit. Danny rammed one of the motorcycles and the cable overrider cut deep into the gunman’s waist as he was crushed between the vehicles.