Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  Except: “I want everybody to grab a weapon. You, Blue Hair! You ever shot a gun? No? Grab anything you can use as a club. Patrick, you make sure she gets moving, but she’s not your problem. Amy, you can shoot, we both know you can.”

  Danny tossed a rifle to Amy. It had a banana clip. Amy grabbed a box of bullets and started thumbing them into the clip. Danny knew Amy hated guns, and hated hunting more—many of her patients were wild animals wounded by idiots who just shot at things for the sheer hell of it. Danny’s own love of hunting sprang from her desire to spend any quality time with her father, but Danny hadn’t been hunting since she returned from the war.

  Danny knew something else about Amy and guns, though: Despite her antipathy toward firearms in general, Amy had been born with the deadeye gift; she could hit damn near anything she aimed at.

  Danny stuffed shotgun shells from the gun cabinet into her pockets, then hefted out the Remington pump shotgun, the last of their Mossbergs, and an ugly sawed-off lever-action she didn’t know the make of. They had confiscated it from that lunatic Jimmy Dietrich in February. Danny turned and threw a box of shells at Weaver.

  “Load this thing up. You know how to shoot?” He nodded. “Good.” She tossed him the short-barreled gun. It looked like a Marlin 410, she realized, and then felt a flash of anger. Her mind was not on the job. Guns weren’t going to solve this problem. Rapid improvisation was the ticket to the rest of their lives.

  Danny had locked the door between the front and back rooms, and after a crash on the other side of the wall, they could all hear the fingers clawing over the surface. And the moan. They were swarming in there, moaning with hunger. Pressing against that door. A thump on the back door. More of them outside. Maria screeched involuntarily and pointed at the window beside her. A flood of pale faces was swirling past, moving toward the alley. They can think a little, Danny saw. They knew enough to look for a door.

  “Patrick, Maria? This button is the safety. Leave it off. This here is the trigger. Aim for the head, and hang on because these things kick.” Danny crossed to Maria and slapped an LAPD-issue Beretta into her tiny hand, then pulled Patrick and Michelle out of the cell. She took Patrick’s hand and closed it around a Saturday night special Danny had personally liberated from an unregistered gardening truck two weeks earlier. He shrank away from the thing, but Danny kept her hands around his until he relaxed a little. Everyone was standing around her now, at the door to the cell. Quick summary, then it was time for all hell to break loose.

  “Those things don’t move fast. They’re not strong. We’re going outside. I’ll clear a space at the back door. Then you go right, you understand me? Come out behind me and go right. There’s a chain-link fence, get behind it and run toward Main Street. Do not stop under any circumstances. You’re going to hear some shouting and screaming from me. Ignore that. It’s for those things. You all get it?”

  The others nodded. Weaver was slipping shells into his shotgun with practiced skill. Maria was holding her automatic by the barrel like a dead fish.

  Weaver spoke: “This decoy thing won’t work. It’s suicide.”

  As if to punctuate his statement, there was a loud impact on the other side of the door between front and back rooms.

  “What?” Patrick said. He didn’t look like he was going to last very long. Weaver put an arm around Patrick’s shoulders and pulled him in tight.

  “She’s going to try and get those things to go one way and we go the other,” Weaver said.

  “But that’s crazy,” Amy said. “Absolutely not, Adelman. I forbid it.”

  Danny didn’t have time for this shit. Weaver unhooked his arm from around Patrick and extended his hand to Danny.

  “You’re a hell of a guy,” he said. They shook hands.

  “No, this isn’t going to happen,” Amy said, and broke the handclasp by stepping between them, her face an inch from Danny’s. Danny said nothing, but pushed Amy away with the barrel of the shotgun across her chest.

  “You have one advantage, and it’s not firepower,” Danny said, turning her back on Amy. She didn’t want any more hesitation. It sent the wrong message. She crossed to the back door. “Your advantage is speed. You need to keep close to the buildings so you’re protected on one side, understand? And run. Run for the motor home. Here’s the hard part. If somebody falls, leave them. If somebody gets bit, don’t stop. Just run. Run like all the devils of hell were after you.”

  “They will be,” Patrick whispered.

  “We’re on the same page, then,” Danny said.

  “Danny,” Amy said. Danny shook her head. No more. There wasn’t another second to waste, because if one person in the world could talk Danny out of doing what she had to do, it was Amy. Danny would have loved to hear why they could do something differently, but none of it would be true. They would end up fighting an army of the undead inside the station, and all of them would be torn apart like Mrs. Larry. Out in the open, there was a chance somebody would get through.

  “Please!” Amy cried.

  Danny couldn’t look her in the eye. She turned to the door, threw back the lock, and yanked the door open.

  Danny racked a shell into the chamber, and it sounded like the apocalypse when she fired it into the mass of exposed teeth in gray faces that surged toward her. A geyser of meat and bone and zombie blood sprayed into the air. The stuff looked like used motor oil. Danny could see the shape of the blast as it carved a channel among the zombies’ heads.

  An instant later she fired again, to her right, and then again, to her left. Six or seven of the things were crumpling, falling away. There was a gap now. Danny fired again and again until the gun was empty, then swung it like a club. She had two more guns across her back, but somehow she didn’t think she was going to get the time to deploy either one.

  “Go!” she barked, and threw herself full-body into the writhing nightmare of limbs and teeth.

  There had been about twenty zombies in the alley when Danny opened the door, and out of the corner of her eye she saw more of them coming from both sides of the building. Only around the door were they packed in tight.

  There was a hair-thin chance.

  But Danny had to break through this first swarm if she was going to get anywhere near Main Street—or anybody else was, for that matter.

  She wasn’t thinking now. Not since she threw the door open. She was only responding to the shape of the situation in front of her, looking for the next action to take.

  The shotgun had plowed huge ruts through the zombies, creating space. Danny hurled herself into it. The zombies went for her. Danny was already moving, rolling on knees and elbows, keeping every part of herself in motion so that the monsters would have to work hard to get a piece of her between their teeth. But she couldn’t move away from where she was, not quickly, or the things would become distracted by the other survivors. They had to keep responding to the easy meat in front of them.

  Danny hadn’t warned her companions to keep quiet. Amy was shouting. If these things hunted by sound, she was ruining everything. Danny felt an excruciating pinch on her leg and brought the shotgun down across the neck of a dead child that had a fold of her skin in its teeth. Danny used twice the force necessary and the small head almost broke free of the neck, but the biting stopped.

  She couldn’t tell if her own skin was broken. She was already back on her feet, whirling the gun to knock back the reaching hands that clawed at her. Whether the others were clear or not, Danny had to start moving fast.

  She broke into a run, and immediately discovered she didn’t have much use of the leg that had been struck by a wing mirror so long ago. She’d let it get stiff. The knots would have to come out the hard way. She forced the sluggish limb to pump alongside the other. Rammed the butt of the shotgun into a gaping mouth, then reversed the thrust into an eye socket directly behind. She left the gun there, the zombie groping to pull the weapon free. The second shotgun, the Mossberg, was already in her hands.

 
She heard shots. Somebody else, at least, had gotten outside. She didn’t know how far away the shots were or what direction they came from. She blew the head off a big zombie in her path and the entire cranium flew off the neck and spiraled into the sky. She leaped at the body as it fell and almost surfed the thing into the zombies behind it, then threw herself through the thicket of legs below.

  Danny felt like there was no strength in her body. The repeated doses of adrenaline, the lack of sleep were catching up fast, and there were parts of the reptile brain that wanted to cut their losses and die. It was a wall, the same one athletes hit. The body ceases to cooperate and willpower takes over. When the willpower is out of bargaining chips, there is nothing else left but to keep moving, somehow. Any way possible. Danny kept moving, but she knew there was nothing but luck between her and a hundred mouths ripping spurting chunks out of her until she died of shock and blood loss.

  Another mouth crushed into the skin of her shoulder, but she twisted away and the teeth only tore her shirt. She ran blindly forward, ramming into the undead, shoving them away with boneless limbs. More gunfire from somewhere, and screaming. Then Danny hit the chain-link fence, so hard it almost knocked her out. She tumbled backward, dazed, and as she hit the pavement, the hands and teeth seemed to pour out of the sunset sky, rushing down to rip her apart.

  There was a deafening bang, and fountains of blackened meat and streams of blood sprayed out and the whole corpse tableau jerked sideways and Weaver was there, firing again with one hand and reaching down for Danny with the other. He dragged her a few feet, Danny using her legs to kick rather than walk, because the zombies were trying to bite her in earnest now, six at a time trying to get a purchase on her flesh. She rolled and came up beside Weaver and they shot their way out like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  They got free of the almost solid mass of things that had converged on Danny’s position, and were now in a narrow channel between those that were turning to follow Danny’s group of survivors, and those that had gone after Danny herself. The things were slow—that was what saved their lives. Danny saw but did not absorb that Patrick, Amy, Maria, and Blue Hair had all made it to the end of the station and were rushing out into Main Street as she and Weaver reached the driveway that led away from the alley.

  Danny and Weaver sprinted after them, the stink of cordite and spilled guts rank in their nostrils.

  The zombies had a tendency to bunch up, because they had no regard for anything but their immediate desire to rip into living flesh. Somewhere in Danny’s mind this fact was filed away and added to the hypothesis. It was already of some use. There was a big gap in the crowd where the zombies had staggered away after the others. Danny rushed into it.

  “Weaver, go after them,” she said.

  “I’m with you,” he replied.

  “You have the keys, asshole!” Danny said.

  Weaver clubbed a zombie to the ground, once a short, stout man with a bald head. The butt of Weaver’s shotgun was covered in scraps of hair and skin.

  “Gave ’em to Patrick,” he said, and ran toward the junction of 144 and Main. And with that, Danny was no longer out in front of her own plan.

  She ran as fast as her stiff leg would carry her, shouting at the top of her lungs and waving her arms to draw as much attention as possible.

  “Come and get it!” she yelled, wishing she could come up with something cleverer. She fired a shot from the hip that blew a zombie’s pelvis open twenty feet away. Its bowels dumped out of its body, coiled intestines bulging through a membranous oyster-colored bag.

  The zombie horde turned about to follow her.

  There was a mass mind in the way the undead responded. When one of them turned to move, the next would turn to look. And so they would focus on prey. The fastest-moving prey they ignored, if there was something slower to be had. There was, if not logic behind it, at least a dim sense of the shortest odds. Some vestige of analysis still echoed inside the blackened, diseased brains of the things. Danny did not think this so much as she knew it as it was happening, so she forced herself to slow down.

  Of Amy and the others there was no sign. As much as half of the zombies had come after Danny, a horde so immense she could not see past the first couple of ranks. How many had continued after the others, she could not guess. The most frightening thing to her was the silence of the zombies. They would break into that moan all at once, and then fall silent, and all she could hear was the scraping of feet and the slap of thick limbs one against the other as they jostled to get close. She could hear Weaver panting for breath.

  There were no more gunshots from the direction of Main Street. Her other companions might be struggling under the teeth of a hundred zombies right now, throats torn out so they couldn’t scream. Danny saw that there wasn’t much room left behind her and Weaver, or in front of them, or anywhere. They had been zigzagging toward Route 144 through gaps in the enemy, but it was a box canyon: The gaps got narrower and narrower.

  “Follow me, quick,” she said to Weaver, and climbed up onto the roof of a vintage Chevy Suburban. It was no kind of place to make a stand, but they might be able to see an escape route from up there. Weaver was right behind her, gasping for breath. He was soaked with sweat and zombie gore. Danny assumed she looked the same. There was a chromed roof rack at their feet; they stamped hard on the hands that reached for them. But already a zombie had crawled onto the hood of the vehicle, following their lead, groping across the metal with fingerless, half-eaten arms. The thing looked up at her. Danny recognized its face, or what was left of it beneath the bloody yellow hair.

  It was Mrs. Larry. She was back from the dead.

  Danny blew the woman’s head all over the brush guards, then methodically reloaded, although her hands were shaking so much she dropped every third shell.

  Amy tried to go after Danny when she hurled herself into the press of zombies. Patrick threw his arm around Amy’s neck and pulled her back as the clutching hands and bared teeth closed around Danny and she disappeared under the things. Weaver moved forward as a space appeared to their right, alongside the back wall of the station.

  “Now,” he had said, and fired his weapon. The roar of the gun snapped Amy out of it. She had to move, or Danny, whether she was injured or not, would stay where she was and be torn apart in front of Amy’s eyes. But in hesitating, Amy had been the last to get out of the station doorway. The zombies that couldn’t get close to Danny had already turned to find the others, leaving Amy a narrow passage that was closing up fast. Patrick was several yards in front of her. His gun went off, once, entirely by mistake, and blew the fingers off a hand that was reaching his way. Then Amy lost sight of him and she was cut off from the others. Cloudy eyes were upon her, a dozen zombies closing the gap. She was pressed up against the cool brick of the station wall, sliding along.

  Then she was at the corner of the station at the driveway and she was as alone as Danny. Someone was screaming and crying very nearby, but Amy couldn’t tell who it was.

  If she’d been on a horse, everything would be different. She could handle a horse better than most, especially on the unsure mountain trails. Ride out of here cowboy style. She even had the hat. But these things would rip the horse apart, too. My horses, Amy thought. She had two of her own, Gladys and Spiro, and they were in the corral. Maybe they’d kicked their way out by now. There were soft but insistent fingers closing around her arms, twining into her hair. Yellow teeth in cheese-colored faces.

  Somewhere there were more gunshots. The screaming was endless.

  Weaver was at her side, pulling her so hard the sleeve tore halfway off her white doctor’s coat. He was yelling at her: “Stop screaming!” He drove the barrel of his gun into the mouth of a zombie that was leaning in to bite Amy, not two feet from her throat, and then he fired the gun, and that zombie’s head did a somersault in the air and the face of the one behind it vanished like a popped balloon, leaving behind a complicated structure of exposed nasal passages
and bone, overhung with rags of brown meat. Amy recoiled as atomized blood and tissue hit her in the face. But her screaming stopped. She followed Weaver, and it was okay, because there was a way out. Weaver was making a path through the zombies. He was covered in black slime, smashing into the zombies, plowing them over. Amy remembered she had a gun, and she thought she should do her bit. More gunshots away up ahead somewhere, and behind her. So she made sure everybody around her was dead, and then aimed at the leg of an old male zombie with a chin beard. The thing showed no response, but Amy couldn’t just shoot it in the head.

  That was the whole problem. People kept shooting each other, or bashing each other with rocks, or whatever they could do to cause pain. Amy didn’t fire. She kept going, the chin-bearded zombie lost from sight, his thin arms outstretched in a pose almost like yearning before the others crowded in between them. Weaver was still there in front of her. Amy hooked her hand in Weaver’s belt so she wouldn’t lose him. He brought the butt of his gun around, but checked the swing.

  “Lemme know it’s you,” he said, in a voice hoarse with fear.

  They made it to Main Street, and they could see right away where the others were. The zombies formed a dense pack in their footsteps, creating gaps in the crowd on either side. They were so stupid, but so dedicated. Like Republicans, Amy thought. She wished irrelevant things wouldn’t come into her head so much. Danny was so focused. Danny was probably dead. Maybe the zombies would not be able to get their teeth into her. Danny was tough as rawhide. Keep those dead guys rollin’, Rawhide! A scrap of the old song popped into Amy’s head. She was losing it.

  Weaver kicked a little kid in the chest, a zombie maybe four years old, then shot a slightly bigger one. Its arm flew off but no blood sprayed out. An adult zombie’s thigh burst apart behind it. Amy heard the screaming again, and she thought it might be her, so she stopped, and the screaming stopped.