by Ben Tripp
She headed away at right angles to the drop location. Early in her walk, she saw a distant figure almost beyond sight, lying atop a kopje of big rocks, elbows up at the shoulders; he must have been watching her with binoculars. One of the half-living, she guessed. He probably didn’t think she could see him, and she made no indication she could. But she’d been a man-hunter too long to miss a human silhouette.
The unliving wouldn’t do anything to hinder her, she expected, not with the public relations value of this visit. She would bring back a glowing safety report that might defuse the tension in town for the Architect and his underlings. None of them would interfere. Unless all of them attacked her at once, which was a distinct possibility if the Architect didn’t think she would bring back a glowing report after all. Danny’s mind was working every facet of the problem at once, her thoughts crowding and shouting for attention. This quiet interlude helped. She was starting to organize the data. A plan would follow. Now that there was a time limit, she had to take decisive action.
She made a great show of walking in a beeline toward where she’d been told to find the outpost. She knew the playbook well: They would have wired ahead to the sentinels there. Clean everything up, conceal anything unpleasant that didn’t suit their story. Danny had encountered this a hundred times in the war zones of the world. Politicians thought the illusion of compliance mattered far more than actually performing according to treaties and human rights standards; Danny knew that it didn’t matter much to boots on the ground, either. Just make a good presentation and let everybody get back to their strongholds. But this was different. She wasn’t interested in a show; she knew better. So she walked along upright and swiftly without deviating from her course until she was sure she’d been seen by another couple of spotters.
Then she found what she’d been hoping for: The badlands were scored by erosion channels that twisted like veins over the coarse ground. They ranged from a couple of meters deep to near-canyon gulfs with walls of ancient, striped stone. At last she encountered one that ran northward, which would take her well off the direct course to the outpost. It was deep and broad. She marched down below the horizon, bearing along her direct course, until her head was invisible to any onlookers beneath the rim of the wash. Then, when her boots found hard stone that wouldn’t leave any tracks, she ran.
She kept up a good pace, following the northward windings of the ravine, for about a kilometer. Then she scrambled up the steep western bank and crawled into the open again on her belly. Plenty of brush to conceal her. She took a few moments to search for another watcher, and saw none. This redoubled her suspicion that someone was keeping an eye on her.
She crawled through the frozen dirt for the length of two football fields, reached some dense shoulder-height scrub, and hustled through it in a half-crouch, like a hunter zero stalking its prey. She was following the same course as before, now, but almost a kilometer north of the expected route, behind what she guessed would be the observers’ line. Her stealth was rewarded: As she moved along below a low ridge of black stone, she crossed a gap. In that gap she saw a figure, certainly one of the sentinels, with his back to her; he was positioned in such a way that he would have enjoyed a good view of her passing by along her original course. He was only a hundred meters to the south of her position. He heard nothing, but stood leaning against a rock, shading his eyes with a hand, staring southward. Danny moved on, angling to the north to increase the distance between herself and the sentinels.
Then she came to the defensive line, the perimeter where the infected waited out the last months of their mortal lives keeping Happy Town safe. She could see a couple of them, standing motionless, eyes fixed on the western horizon. They were supposed to be harmless around the living, like the ones in town, but they gave her the creeps. She was too acquainted with the hunger they felt to reveal herself unexpectedly to them. Far from the eyes of town, bored and ravenous, they could attack her and claim she’d never arrived. Danny continued to move cautiously, although she had very little time to lose; any moment now they would realize she had disappeared, and they would be following her intended route back to find her.
As she drew closer, bent double so that her chest was parallel to the ground, she saw that there were moaners out beyond these infected few; more and more the closer she got. They drifted parallel to the line formed by these sentinels, and now and then a sigh of hunger would punctuate their wandering, like the groan of rigging on abandoned ships. The terrain became grassland to the west, which represented the easternmost fringe of the plains where Danny had discovered the radioactive train wreck and where she had left the Tribe. Here was scrub and short, tough trees. She was almost upon the line by now, and saw that there was a physical border between the land of the undead and the land of the unliving.
Buckets—white five-gallon paint buckets, black plastic nursery pots originally for rosebushes, trash bins, anything that would hold liquid—had been set down in a ragged bow-shaped line running north to south, curving toward the east at each extreme, forming an immense hoop with its center somewhere near Happy Town. Did they shit in the buckets? Fill them with thinker laundry? It had to be scent-based, whatever their system for deterring the moaners.
Danny crawled the last of the distance with her chin in the grass, desperate not to be seen but equally determined to see what the sentinels used to keep the zeroes at bay. Whatever it was, she intended to use the same system in the future. This was the secret of Happy Town. Break that formula, and every place could become a refuge.
The nearest bucket was an ornamental planting pot made of terra-cotta, stamped with swags and cherubs. Probably from someone’s front porch. The one to the south about thirty meters distant was a drywall Spackle bucket, the one equidistant to the north a rusty steel drum that had once contained deep-frying oil. All around the five-gallon size. She could see one of the sentinels with his back to her, close enough so she could see the emblem stenciled on the back of his insulated vest. Slightly too far to read the lettering. From here she moved like a cold snake, lazily slithering toward the terra-cotta pot, moving with as little sound as she could.
There was a terrible stink near the pot. She suspected she’d been correct about the deterrent; probably these things crapped in the buckets, one after another, keeping the stench fresh. She wriggled around until the bulk of the pot was between her and the sentinel, then got her knees under her and gingerly raised her eyes to the top of the container, keeping them fixed on the sentinel’s back. He continued to stand casually, relaxed, shifting his weight from foot to foot. The picture of boredom. Danny’s nose was almost over the rim of the pot by now, and she risked breaking visual contact with the sentinel to glance down into the pot.
Cloudy eyes stared up at her, skinless teeth snapping; the head floated in a pool of rotten blood and gutted vermin, boiling with maggots even in the freezing air. Steam rose from the cadaver-broth.
She almost cried out, but stifled the shock with her good hand and flung herself back on the ground, flat and shaking.
“Who’s there?” a voice cried, hoarse from long disuse.
Danny lay in the dirt, choking back a flush of acid in her throat. She waited. No footfalls approaching, nothing but some warring songbirds in the tall grass. The pot stood between her and the sentinel; she doubted he could see any part of her. But precious time was slipping away, and she might be stuck here indefinitely.
Then she heard a radio line crackle open, and there was a brief conversation. Moments later the sentinel scurried away. She waited for another thirty seconds and cautiously raised her head. The sentinel was almost gone from view, hurrying along down the line of pots southward. Her absence from the appointed route must have been noted. Her time was now extremely limited.
She scrambled to the next pot, and the next, keeping as low as she could, watchful in case another sentinel was answering the call. But none came.
In each pot there was a severed head, usually with the entire nec
k and throat attached. Each head was half-submerged in obscene ichor of guts and dead animals, probably by way of a nutrient solution, to keep the things animated. She hurried down the line and peered into another dozen containers. From each a pair of sunken, sightless eyes rolled up at her, accompanied by sneering, champing jaws.
She looked up and down the line and guessed there must be a thousand such containers. Only a few of the sentinels were volunteers. The rest had little choice, deprived of their bodies as they were. She wondered if any of the things were conscious.
At least she now knew the secret to the key defense of Happy Town.
• • •
Thirty minutes later, the sentinels found Danny sitting at the bottom of a ravine in more or less the correct path, one boot off, massaging her ankle.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she said harshly, as soon as the first of them appeared atop the edge of the ravine. “I damn near broke my leg.”
It took a while, limping as she was, and unwilling to accept any assistance from the unliving; they walked along beside her, and she had time to see what they really looked like without makeup and fresh clothes. They appeared more or less like thinkers, except there was a livid purple stain around their eyes and their lips were swollen and congested and black. Their hearts must still be forcing some blood around inside them. Their skin was metallic and gray, with an almost gelatinous transparency. Their clothes were as rotten as those of the moaners wandering along the western horizon, but kept in some sort of order, and some of the items—boots and jackets, mostly—were recent additions. The things must still be susceptible to cold. Still human in that way.
She hobbled along between six of them, and others came near to look at her before returning to their posts. All of them looked like ghosts, sallow and emaciated and with incalculably sad, hungry eyes that watched her with something near to yearning. Danny was reminded of Oliver Twist, one of the eight or nine books she had ever finished in her life. She’d read it in high school. The descriptions of abject poverty had fascinated her, because until she read that old book she hadn’t understood that she herself was poor. These things looked at her the way the children in that book watched the feasting of their superiors, swallowing their own saliva and dreaming of something more substantial to fill their bellies. There was only a shred of humanity left to them.
She saw something else in their eyes, but couldn’t name it. Had she thought about what these creatures knew of her, or had heard the stories they had been told, she would have known it was awe.
They were afraid of her.
After a fifteen-minute interval of limping along that would otherwise have been five, they reached the outpost. It was a tin shed with sods of dead grass on the roof, probably to keep it from blowing away. There was a radio aerial towering up over the shed and a single power line strung up on ten-foot poles that ran away to the east. A couple of pickup trucks stood in the hard-packed dirt of the yard. Down the access road a little way was an Asplundh wood-chipping truck with a Dumpster next to it.
An unliving in whom the infection wasn’t quite as advanced as it was in the others emerged from the shed. She was missing a lot of hair, and her face was marked with opalescent boils that looked to Danny like the mutations she’d been seeing more and more of among the undead; it was probably this affliction that had caused her to be sent away from Happy Town prematurely. No makeup could cover these growths, which resembled eyeballs bulging from crusty red lids. But she had the vulnerabilities of the living, still, and breathed and coughed and covered her pustulant face with her hand when Danny came close, like a geisha concealing laughter.
“We thought we’d lost you,” the woman said. “You’ll pardon me if I won’t shake your hand. I’m Lashawna. Are you hurt?”
“Took a fall down one of those gullies,” Danny said. “I should have let somebody drive me out here.”
“I’ll drive you back,” Lashawna said. “God it’s good to see another liv—I mean, somebody who can talk and stuff. These guys are so quiet. I’ve been out here for a month getting colder and colder and there’s just nothing going on except those things out there and these guys over here and a whole lot of smelly buckets.”
“What happened to your face?” Danny said. She didn’t want to chat.
“It’s a symptom.”
“It sure is,” Danny said. That took care of Lashawna’s desperate desire to talk. “Tell me about these buckets,” Danny went on, when she realized Lashawna might start crying.
“We . . . Okay. We put remains in the buckets. Any undead that get destroyed, they go in the buckets. We, um, relieve ourselves in them, too.”
She didn’t mention the still-animated heads. The best lie is almost true.
“The buckets are just part of it,” Lashawna continued. “The main thing is we’re here. The moaners won’t attack us because of our condition, which I guess you know about, but there aren’t enough of us to make a solid wall. So the buckets make sort of halfway-stops to keep those things away.”
“You just crap in the buckets and chop up moaners and put them in the buckets?” Danny said.
“That’s it.”
“Like hamburger?”
“I can show you,” Lashawna said.
Danny made a limping inspection of a dozen of the buckets nearest the outpost, which had been filled just as Lashawna described. There were no severed heads gnashing their teeth in these ones, of course, but a slurry of purple-brown, unidentifiable mush. They stank the same, but lacked that crucial ingredient, the thing that really kept the moaners at bay. Still, the subterfuge was convincing, and Danny allowed herself to be convinced. An especially effective flourish occurred toward the end of her visit, when a pickup with a couple of moaner corpses in the back arrived at the outpost.
Danny and Lashawna watched from the doorway of the shed as a pair of sentinels climbed out of the pickup; another emerged from the cab of the wood-chipping truck, which was of the commercial type, like a big orange-painted garbage truck. The three of them off-loaded the corpses; then the one from the cab returned and started the chipping mechanism, which roared and coughed smoke. Then the three of them unceremoniously tossed the corpses into the chipper. The steady rattle of the motor went shrill and staccato as the bodies were torn to pulp. Once the unit was powered down, the sentinels rolled the Dumpster to the back of the truck; then the operator tipped the entire cargo bed back on its hydraulics and a slurry of black muck slurped into the Dumpster.
“That’s the system,” Lashawna said. “It’s obviously pretty nasty, but it works.”
“And this would work anywhere? To keep the moaners out?”
“Oh, sure, I guess,” Lashawna said, sounding entirely unsure.
“Amazing,” Danny said. There was nothing more to learn here. She’d politely (or impolitely) watched the show put on for the visiting dignitary; none of them suspected, as far as she could tell, that she’d discovered how they really kept the perimeter zero-proofed. Everything was going according to the Architect’s plan. And Danny had gotten what she needed to know: On her walk from town she’d seen the barricaded turn-off road that led around the mountain to the resort. She’d seen how big the safe zone around town was. She’d seen how close to the perimeter the moaners came, and that there were a lot of them out there waiting for a breach in the line.
Happy Town was one small fuck-up from disaster, and there were fifty fuck-ups waiting to happen.
Maybe the Risen Flesh didn’t know it, but the Architect certainly did, or he wouldn’t be rushing to get the escape train ready: This little safe place was almost out of borrowed time.
• • •
It was getting dark, later than she’d intended, when Danny got into a truck with Lashawna, with one of the sentinels riding in back; the sentinel got down a kilometer outside Happy Town, and Lashawna stopped a couple of hundred meters from the front gates.
“I can’t come any closer, because of . . . you know,” she said.
“Yeah, I sure do,” Danny said, cruelly. Her mean streak was getting worse, she thought. But she could not hide her contempt for these creatures who had given up their humanity so cheaply, who had allied themselves with their mortal enemies. Lashawna was a vulnerable, very sick, terribly deformed woman whose future was even bleaker than that of the living who were doomed to be devoured alive. But she was also a collaborator, a traitor not just to her species, but to everything with a pulse in its veins. If Danny had found an opportunity, she would have destroyed her companion without hesitation.
“I gotta piss,” she said, by way of farewell, and left Lashawna to her unhappy fate. Then she limped toward the nearby burial cairn and out of sight of the town gate. The truck drove away into the badlands.
Danny glanced back to make sure she wasn’t observed, then crouched down and circled the pile of stones, her heart accelerating into her throat. If the pack wasn’t there—but it was. She saw it propped among the stones at the base of the pile, the black nylon camouflaged with a few handfuls of dirt. She opened the combination lock and checked the contents. All there. She almost missed the note tucked into the handle, as it had slipped to the ground, but paper litter was rare in those days. It caught her eye. She read the note twice.
Then she headed back up the wash, backpack slung over her shoulder as if she’d had it with her the entire time. The feigned limp was gone, no longer required. She passed through the gates as they were laboriously shoved open by the guards. Nobody spared the pack a glance.
Her course of action was perfectly clear, now. Her resolve was set. She might have remained undecided, except for the contents of the last bucket she’d looked into during the unauthorized part of her reconnaissance. It was just another severed head with its bare teeth and rolling eyeballs, except Danny knew the face, because it was fresh and the features were unmarked by decay. It had once belonged to one of her finest scouts. Ernie—who was also Topper’s best friend. Even then, she might have found some way to reconcile herself to the savage frontier justice of these people.