by Ben Tripp
A zero was standing beside the vehicle.
It had been a tall black man once; now it was gunmetal-colored. The thing’s clothing was stained and rotten. Wherever Danny could see exposed skin, it was covered in masses of tissue that looked like red grapes. They burst through the thing’s rags and hung in heavy fist-sized bunches. For some reason, the zero didn’t seem to be attracted to Danny. It just stared at the police car.
“Hey,” Danny called, placing a jug at her feet and drawing her gun.
The zero turned its shrunken gray eyes toward her, then stumbled in her direction. Danny raised the weapon. Her hands shook terribly but it was an easy shot.
“Kiiiimuh,” the zero moaned through its swollen face.
Danny hesitated. It was a thinker. Or almost a thinker.
“Kiii—muh,” it said again, and fell to its knees. It was facing her, eyes fixed on hers. Then it lowered its head, offering its skull to her. Danny saw that the things growing out of its skin were translucent and had dark, wormlike filaments inside. Her stomach lurched. She tasted acid in her throat.
“Can you understand me?” Danny said.
The thing did not respond. Danny stood there a long time, squinting past her gun at the bowed head of the zero. The thing raised one blistered finger and pressed it to its own temple.
“Kiiii—muh.”
Danny squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered the crown of the head, making a star-shaped hole, and black debris spurted out of its mouth; the zero fell on its side. She looked around the ranch and didn’t see anything else coming for her. She was cold again. She holstered her weapon, picked up a jug of water, and got back into the interceptor.
Kill me. That’s what it had been trying to say.
• • •
The White Whale looked like a mirage. Danny watched it through her binoculars.
Earlier, she had made a detour to the northeast, revisiting the radioactive train wreck. There was an iPhone Geiger counter—an accessory that had become popular on the West Coast when Japan had its meltdown—in the trunk of the interceptor, and she kept the thing charged. Lots of people had them now—the scouts all carried one. At the scene of the wreck, it had registered more radiation than the device could express. It was absurd, but she’d held her breath and run toward the derailed cars with one hand thrown up in front of her face as if the radiation was just heat from a fire.
Now she wasn’t far from the place she had left the Tribe. The zeroes that had attacked the Vandals had returned to the swarm, apparently; on the interstate she saw some ravaged human remains and a few inanimate zeroes, but none moving. Taking the exit onto that minor road required more courage than it did to confront the seething invisible death inside the ruptured containment car.
She didn’t expect the Tribe to be where she’d last seen it, between the slaughterhouse and the church; they would have gone east long before then. But she was still a couple of kilometers away when she saw the glitter of window glass far down the road. She pulled over and climbed unsteadily onto the hood of the vehicle and used her binoculars to see what lay ahead. She saw a boxy shape that had to be the White Whale, and many smaller vehicles before and behind it. It looked as if the entire Tribe was still sitting there, a week later (or however long it had been). She was too far away to be certain but she thought she saw human figures moving around.
So she rolled on up the road, heart pounding with fear that she would be rejected by the very people she had spent so long sneering at for their weakness.
She was going back to apologize to the people who had destroyed her sister.
But she couldn’t gain access to the anger.
Somehow she’d always known Kelley’s strange existence could not end well. Kelley herself had predicted she would murder Danny—what happened after that? A shot through the head, same as what actually did happen. She went out with a gut full of human flesh either way. That had always been the plan.
Danny wanted to blame the chooks. She wanted it all to be their fault. But she simply could not. Maybe it was the eternal hangover.
She spotted what she thought was a familiar face—one of the civilians from the Tribe, wandering around alone.
But as she drove closer, she saw it was a zero. Once a Tribesperson. A woman who had been wounded in the fighting. How had she come to this place? Why had she not been delivered out of the world on a bullet?
Danny was perplexed. Thinking about it made her head hurt even worse; tears were leaking out of her eyes. Not tears of grief, but of pain. Maybe both. Mostly pain. The thing was half a kilometer from the back of the convoy, and must have been wandering around aimlessly since the fight. Danny rolled to a halt beside it, rolled her window down. The zero hissed and opened its jaws. She shot it on the fifth try, her hand shaking although she rested it across the frame of the door. The noise of the gunshots set her ears ringing, and they didn’t stop. Now she couldn’t hear properly. She was going to have to be very careful with her senses as dull as they were.
Her thoughts kept uselessly returning to the matter of what she ought to have done, and what she would do next. Why hadn’t she skipped the drinking game and just gone back and made amends? Two years back, it would have been pride. But this was something else. She figured it was something between shame and fear. It was her job to go back to the Tribe and seek forgiveness. She didn’t expect to be nominated to lead them again, of course, and she didn’t want the job. Maybe she wouldn’t even be allowed to ride with them anymore. It didn’t matter how they responded. She hoped only to be understood by anyone with enough sense to see what kind of a situation she’d been put in, and maybe for someone to say they understood. Maybe. She wanted some kind of absolution.
But she was afraid nobody would understand. She didn’t know how to apologize. She might get it wrong. She might not find any words at all.
• • •
There were a lot of crows in the sky. That meant undead. Dread was settling over her heart as she approached the convoy. When she reached that fatal battleground, it shocked her to see how hastily the Tribe had abandoned the scene: There were Vandal corpses strewn where they fell, and empty vehicles scattered along the road at all angles. It was clear they’d packed up and left in a hurry. Danny saw one leather-clad zero, a biker in life, making its way across the slaughterhouse lot. A couple of hunters emerged from the bushes in front of the church—right where the Silent Kid had been trying to go. She’d known them in life, too, ordinary scared people, now hunched, vicious things, scuttling along the parking lot so as to remain alongside the interceptor, in case she stepped out. But they didn’t come close. Smarter than the moaners. One was the driver of the shuttle bus, Sue Baxter.
Danny stopped the interceptor alongside the White Whale and opened the door. Put a foot on the ground. The hunters froze, their sunken eyes fixed on her position. She waited, and saw them begin to move. They slunk crabwise toward a motorcycle that lay crumpled on its side and crouched down behind it. She could still see them, but this was instinct. Like cats. The aching in her head was expanding with every heartbeat. She didn’t want to wait—she wanted to gun the things down and be done with it, find out what happened to the Tribe. But she couldn’t move around with hunters nearby. Not without Kelley at my side, she thought.
There was a noise off to her left. Danny searched around among the parked vehicles of the Tribe and saw a moaner working its way down the line. A Vandal with a wide cut in its throat. Again, Danny wondered where the mercy shots had been. She needed answers, and fast. As she scanned the area, she realized there were a lot of the undead around, attracted by her arrival, and if she wanted to solve anything, she had to work quickly, headache be damned.
She decided to take the risk. Hooked a fresh magazine from the backpack, checked the load in her pistol, and got all the way out of the car. The hunters were galvanized; one sprinted, low to the ground, toward the line of vehicles ahead; it wanted to get around behind her while the other stalked in front. Sh
e loosed several rounds at it and got lucky—its leg buckled, and the thing was left cackling incoherently on the ground, unable to get under cover. She ignored it, turning her attention to the RV instead. There was something written on the bullet-pocked windshield; she could see it backward through the open passenger door. She chanced leaving the cover of the interceptor’s bulk, keeping one eye on the zero still hunkered down behind the motorcycle, and made her way around until she could read the message.
All down the convoy, there were more undead emerging from the shadows. They were looking for ways into the cars and trucks, probably attracted by the strong scent of humans that hung around them. Most were unknown; a few were once Tribespeople. They were pawing the windows, groping along the sides, looking for openings. Danny wondered briefly if the living humans were hidden inside their rides, heads down, but that was absurd. They would have fought back.
The convoy was deserted. She was the last living Tribesperson here.
Suddenly, the still-mobile hunter—the revenant of Sue Baxter—was far closer than Danny expected—a few yards away, sucking the air to get the smell of her, almost to the interceptor. She’d let her attention slide. She fired the pistol and the thing’s jaw snapped sideways. A second shot brought it down. The ringing in her ears increased.
There were more of them, more than she had bullets, coming on as fast as they could move their clumsy limbs. No further hunters, at least. No thinkers in evidence. She looked up at the broad, flat face of the White Whale and read the message scrawled there in soap:
PROPERTY OF THE TRIBE
BRB
Danny went back and locked herself inside the interceptor, then drove along the file of vehicles, using the overrider on the bumper to shove the zeroes out of the way as they came on. Scaly hands clawed at the windows. One of the undead had a short length of pipe in its hand, but it lacked the coordination to strike effectively. There was a clank on the roof and that was all. She ran the wounded hunter over.
Now that she could see the entire convoy, she realized most of the high-capacity vehicles were missing—the shuttle bus and others like it were gone, although the White Whale remained behind, probably because several of its massive tires had been shot to pieces in the combat. It only carried one spare. So the living had gone away, packed together like sardines in the minimum number of machines, with hardly any luggage—most of the gear was still inside or on top of the vehicles they’d left behind.
She felt a vast loneliness rising up around her like the wings of a gigantic bird. She had again forsaken the people she knew in the world, and they had done their part and gone away themselves. Wulf was dead.
It was only her and the zeroes and thousands of square miles of empty landscape.
They must have hightailed it to the train depot, probably led by Topper, and caught a train or walked from there. Somewhere to the east, anyway. Where were the nearest living human beings? The guards watching the train line, probably. Maybe those anonymous travelers who had gotten off the courtesy shuttle when Mike the kidnapper showed up.
That’s when Danny saw him.
It was sheer coincidence that Mike happened to be in her mind when she passed the foremost vehicle in the convoy and saw something dark and shapeless hanging from the slaughterhouse sign beside it. The sign stood on a massive arm of galvanized steel, tall enough to drive a tractor-trailer under it. Amalgamated Rendering, the big black letters proclaimed. Beef, Mutton. There was antipigeon wire along the top of the sign, like a bottle brush.
Beneath it hung a dead man. Danny would not have guessed it was Mike, except for his clothing and shoes. His hands were cuffed together behind him. His face was contorted, eggplant-colored, his neck twice as long as it should have been, a bundle of taut cords cinched in at the jaw by a noose.
“Holy fuck,” Danny breathed, leaning forward as she drove past the effigy until her head touched the steering wheel. Then it was out of view behind the roof.
Whoever had hung Mike there must have climbed a ladder. Or they’d used the telephone line repair truck’s extendable bucket.
In addition to stringing up the prisoner, someone had spray-painted a message over the lettering on the sign:
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO KIDNAPERS
It didn’t occur to Danny to cut him down. There were too many zeroes following her path down the convoy. He wasn’t going to be any less dead. She’d burned Kelley’s body and she’d burned Wulf’s, as well, on a pyre of boards from the shed doused in sweet liqueurs. Mike would have to wait for the crows to release him from bondage.
Danny’s repentant frame of mind was gone. Here was murder in cold blood. They had left their own dead behind to turn into monsters and hanged the prisoner while they were at it. Why? Because Danny wasn’t around? What had Amy been doing? Patrick? Troy? Had they stood by or had they argued?
There was no coming back after this.
Danny wondered if anyone had left a note, besides the scrawl on the White Whale’s windshield and the painted message on the sign over Mike’s corpse. It didn’t matter. She had gone back to apologize, only to discover the Tribe had murdered her prisoner. Whether it was retaliation for what she herself had done, or the assertion of new leadership, or merely an old-fashioned lynching, they were now even.
She’d be damned if she would ever apologize to them. In fact, she was a hell of a lot more likely to kill the bastards if she ever saw them again.
The headache that had been stalking her began to open up, to bloom like a time-lapse film of a rose blossom opening. But the petals were jagged, bloody claws, and the red flower was the tissue of her brain splitting apart. Her limbs stopped responding to commands. She was accelerating past Mike’s gibbet when her nerveless foot slipped off the accelerator. The interceptor swung around of its own accord. Danny found the brake with a boot that seemed to weigh as much as her body. She came to a stop facing the front of the convoy, blinking back fireworks of white-hot light that rocketed through her eyeballs. Sizzling electric auras. Was she having a stroke?
Something was running out of her nose. She swiped at it: blood. There was a noise like machinery in her head. Danny’s vision was turning red the way it did when she was very, very angry. But her heartbreak was bigger. And more than that, she was in agony. The redness before her eyes was laced with veins that flashed to the beating of her heart. She needed to get out of here before she passed out—there must have been thirty or forty zeroes coming up the road after her.
She saw a small zero, a hunter by the way it moved, running onto the pavement from a drainage culvert set alongside the edge of the church property. A child hunter. Where were the others? They worked in numbers. Danny’s thoughts were sliced apart by the pain, as if she had to think through a rank of slashing knives.
The thing ran straight at her. She groped around for her sidearm with useless fingers.
It was the Silent Kid, with his bat-eared little dog tucked under his arm like a football, running in her direction for dear life.
The mass of undead were now homing in on the child. Danny needed to get him out of there, if the boy made it as far as the interceptor. He wouldn’t make it back to his drainpipe.
Half-blind, Danny fumbled for the door handle, hoping to get out and shoot the nearest zeroes. Popped the latch, but instead of standing up she fell helplessly to the pavement, facedown, her head churning with pain, filled with blood lightning that set her skull on fire. Her boots were still inside the vehicle. She couldn’t use her legs, her arms.
The Silent Kid reached the interceptor half a minute ahead of the closest zeroes. Danny tried to speak to him, to tell him to get in, dump her feet out of the car, lock the doors. She was done for. She’d rather be torn apart than endure the pain in her head another instant. Instead of words, bile came out of her mouth. With an effort almost beyond her strength, Danny got to her knees, reached back into the interceptor, dragged the munitions backpack off the floor of the passenger side, and pulled it to her chest, strugglin
g with the zippers.
The Kid was waving with his free hand now, leaping and gesturing at something behind Danny. She tried to struggle upright, but gravity had gone off-axis. She fell over backward and sprawled on the asphalt. She saw a wheelchair. The medics are here at last, she thought. But there was already somebody in it. She heard a strange thwack. And another, and another. Something whistling through the air. A meaty crunch.
“Get up,” a female voice said, and Danny felt a handcuff snap onto her outstretched arm, heard the jingle of the chain. Then she was sliding across the pavement, and there were wheels arching up above her, someone between them, at the top of a cliff trying to pull her up. She blinked and the redness in the world turned green; she blinked again and a slab of red-stained darkness like a collapsing bridge came crashing down and the whole world snuffed out.
PART TWO
1
“If you die, I have to shoot you,” a voice called from the end of a very long tunnel.
Danny blinked and saw what looked like the edges of a film strip, sprocket holes in the sky. She squinted. Not sprocket holes, but windows.
She was lying on her back inside a vehicle. Her head still hurt, but it was nothing. The savage torture that had visited her back at the abandoned convoy was gone, replaced by an ordinary headache. The dull throb of it was almost comforting, like having a doctor’s note to stay home from school despite being only a little bit ill.
The woman who had spoken was the color of bittersweet chocolate, black-eyed, with a fleck of pigment in the white of her left eye. The hair on her head was carelessly buzzed short, all the way down to the scalp in some places. She had strong, lean arms. Her teeth looked luminous in her dark face.
“Where’s the Kid?” Danny mumbled.
“Asleep underneath your bed,” the woman said.
A shot of panic hit Danny’s kidneys and burned through her bloodstream before she found the backpack she’d been lugging around was right by her side. The zipper lock was intact.