Rise Again
Page 26
She saw one of the 1980s Mustangs like her first, a few cars back from her position. An ugly piece of shit. But it offered a nice view all around, being a low vehicle. She could try taking the gas from that one. But would anybody that drove one of those mullet-mobiles keep the tank topped up? A better car might have more gas in it, simply because the owner could afford it.
Something was moving around inside the hotel. Somewhere behind her. Maybe there had been a zombie upstairs that was coming down to investigate. She had to make a choice, now.
Danny pushed the French doors open and moved outside. The heat inside and out was equally oppressive, but the air outside was tainted with the stink of rotting bodies. Nothing on the patio to be worried about: She saw a corpse, but it was a proper one, with the head bashed in. An iron umbrella stand lay next to it. There were useful skull-smashing weapons everywhere, if you were willing to improvise.
Danny kept her body parallel to the ground and scooted to the hedge, then looked over the top of it. The longer she could delay her discovery, the better her chances of getting the vital gasoline. She scanned the cars and saw, from her fresh angle, an ideal candidate: a vintage two-door Jaguar in good condition. It wouldn’t have a locking gas cap, it would have a short filler tube, and it wasn’t too far into the parking lot.
Danny checked the ground for zombies. None between her and the minivan, at least. She hustled across that distance, then checked again, keeping her motions sure and swift. Momentum was key. She made it to the ugly Mustang, then scuttled crabwise to the Jaguar, keeping an eye on two bodies she could now see lying on the far side of the minivan. They might get active. She pried the filler door on the Jag’s gas tank open and fed the hose in. The tang of gasoline fumes joined the thick, dull smell of decaying meat.
A cloud of crows rose into the air. Danny followed them with her eyes, sucking the air out of the free end of the hose. She could taste the gasoline vapors, and wished she had found a narrower tube. The hose took almost more vacuum pressure than she could create with her lungs. She could feel the resistance inside it, the counterweight from the rising column of gasoline.
And then she heard the moaning.
The undead beside the minivan stirred in the dirt. They weren’t up yet. They were emerging from the trance or coma they had been in. Prey was here at last.
One of the zombies was looking around now, its trunk supported on its arms. It hadn’t yet stood up. Danny saw another one on the edge of her vision, and turned to see a male zombie around her age. It was lurching toward her on naked feet.
She sucked again at the hose, the negative pressure making her ears hurt deep inside at the corners of her jaw. This wasn’t going to work.
The minivan zombies had seen her now. She checked on the position of the male coming at her across the parking lot, and beyond it, she saw an old Mustang Fastback.
It looked a lot like hers. It was the right year, or appeared to be. It had the side markers in back so it was at least a ’68. But she couldn’t tell what color it was. The discovery threw her concentration off, and she gasped, and the column of fuel fell back down the inside of the hose and she had lost her chance to get the siphon working.
Now she had another problem, as well: She couldn’t leave this parking lot without checking that car. She had to know.
Danny didn’t have a plan anymore. She threw herself across the hood of the Jaguar, raising a cloud of dust, and landed almost on top of a corpse on the other side. It didn’t react. It was dead matter. But a foul, choking stench hissed out of it, obliterating the stink of gasoline.
Danny saw the zombies around her—there were six of them—become confused. She didn’t know how else to identify their behavior. They looked around as if blinded, and they moaned out of sync with each other. They lost the forward impetus that had carried them toward her.
Danny felt an urgent need to vomit. The stink of the corpse she had stamped on was so intense it was like a smoke her lungs couldn’t pull down. She retched once, then ran at the male zombie. It sensed her at last, and raised its arms. Danny rammed the butt of the shotgun into its face, but didn’t pause to deliver the killing blow. She kept moving, and a dozen strides later the Mustang was right in front of her.
Its color was impossible to guess under the dust—dark, was all she could tell. Danny rushed forward and reached out, ignoring the zombies that now surged stiff-legged after her, and the half-dozen others that were spilling through the entrance of the parking lot. She ran her fingers across the dust, and crimson streaks were left behind, so red and wet she checked her fingers to see if she was bleeding.
It was not blood. It was Candyapple Red paint.
Danny turned around and fired the shotgun into the nearest mass of zombies. She didn’t aim. It tore a glistening black swath through the dusty bodies. They swayed backward and kept coming. Danny reached out again and grasped the door handle. Depressed the button. It wasn’t locked. There was a good, solid Detroit click and the door was open.
Danny flung herself inside the car. It was a furnace-hot twilight in there, the dust on the windows cutting half the sunlight. There was no view out, except through the driver’s side window where the dust had fallen away when Danny slammed the door. The zombies were five yards from the car. She slapped down the door lock buttons and gasped for breath, supernovas bursting behind her eyes. She had scarcely drawn breath since her boot sank into the corpse. Then she looked around to ascertain the thing of which she was already sure.
This particular ’68 interior was black on black. Totally stock. There was the thin-rimmed, two-spoke steering wheel with its seven decorative medallions. The crooked chrome shifter on the carpeted transmission hump. The five round instruments in the sleek wood-grain dashboard. Breathe, Danny.
Tucked under the chrome strip along the lower face of the dash, a receipt for gas from Riverton Junction Texico.
On the passenger seat was the leather jacket Danny had left in the car the last time she drove it.
As impossible as she’d begun to think it was, she was sitting inside her own beloved Mustang.
With the paroxysm of relief came the stark realization that the trail had run cold. She’d found the car, but she hadn’t found Kelley.
She turned her eyes on the zombies. They were anonymous in death, slack-skinned and characterless and cement-white with dust except for the wet punctures of their eyes. Danny saw that these had been secreting snot from their tear ducts; there were dark, gelatinous strings running down their cheeks from the eyes, like beached sea turtles.
None of these zombies looked like Kelley. But there were thousands lying in the streets of this town. Danny saw into a future like a madman’s vision of hell, in which she had to search every decaying face—and even then, she would not know. How many more of these things had wandered cross-country? How many dead were lying in the brush, the ravines, the sewers? How many turned to ash in the fires? There was so little chance of finding her sister.
But you found the Mustang.
For once, Danny agreed with the voice. But with the knowledge that she had reached her first impossible goal came terrible responsibility. There was so much more to do, and now she was trapped inside a car, surrounded by hundreds of ravenous walking dead.
She didn’t have the ignition key.
Again Danny felt that sensation of tipping over the edge, of the great wheel of life turning beneath her feet, of staring into the void. Kelley had put the gas receipt right where Danny always put them. The car was in perfect order. It was ready to go, requiring only the key to bring it to life.
Danny realized, with a dismal feeling, that she would have to jump-start the vehicle. As a cop, she could jump-start a bicycle, but she wasn’t fast at it. The process might take longer than she had to live. The undead were right outside, separated only by a sheet of glass.
Then again, Kelley might have been observing Danny’s strict discipline regarding the vehicle, even after she stole it from the driveway. She
’d even tucked the gas receipt right where Danny put them herself.
If Kelley observed Danny’s habits with the Mustang to the letter, it was possible she would yet save Danny’s life. The zombies were on the car now, their hands and faces making smears in the dust on the windshield, clearing patches that looked onto the nightmare outside. Thumping on the roof, clawing at the windows. Danny could smell them in the fetid air. One of the things dragged peeling lips across the windshield, its graphite-colored tongue thrusting against the glass, teeth scraping. It was like the view from a coffin being dug up by cannibals. Right now would be an excellent time for a drink, an excellent time for a long, burning swallow of something strong, but there wasn’t one to be had. Danny was either sitting in her own tomb, or—
Sweating profusely, Danny reached up and flipped down the driver’s side sun visor.
The keys dropped into her lap.
1
Some part of Danny had curled up and gone to sleep, but the rest of her remained in constant motion, methodical and focused on the one and only task besides brute survival. For this she didn’t need a working hypothesis, she only needed a pen.
She was drawing lines over every route she covered on the map, with scribbled notes wherever there was a town: Culper, 350, NL, NK, food, drugs, hdwr, Z. This was the name of the town, the population, NL for “no life,” NK for no sign of Kelley. Then what stores in town might be useful. And finally, Z for zombies.
Danny had left the police interceptor by the side of the road outside Potter, taking the time to push it onto the scenic overlook and cover it with a blue plastic tarp she’d found outside town. She weighted the tarp down with rocks and guessed that inside a few days it would be so dusty as to become invisible. If somebody got into the vehicle and vandalized it, no worries. She had her pick of thousands, out there in the world.
She kept the Mustang’s police-band radio on at all times now, the glove box door hanging open to expose the faceplate and microphone of the miniature detective-style unit that was Danny’s only concession to modifying the otherwise factory stock car. Things were happening in the world outside her remote desert beat. There were a lot of survivors out there.
Danny heard someone on the radio speculate that half of the population was still alive. So 150 million Americans, more or less. But according to the voices in the ether, they were engaged in costly battles with the zombies for possession of the cities, trying to clear out densely concentrated areas such as Chicago, Manhattan, and Miami. Denver was an inferno, as were San Diego, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Part of San Francisco was on fire. Hundreds of smaller towns were burning.
Much of humanity, it seemed, had banded back together in large groups. That was an ancient survival strategy, of course, and mankind was returning to basics. It made no sense to Danny. For most people, having someone on your flank, even if that person didn’t know shit about survival, was a comfort. For herself, and probably a lot of ex-warriors, it was better to be alone. Better to trust your own reflexes than to put your hope in some civilian with an undeveloped sixth sense that thought you could ever relax, even for one minute, and didn’t know how to properly clear a building. And sometimes, even a seasoned partner could be dangerous—you never want to be the slowest contestant in a foot race against the Devil. Danny was glad to be solo.
It had been two days since she had seen another living human being. She listened to voices on the radio, some of which she was starting to recognize, but it wasn’t the same as company. She never spoke back to them. She didn’t want to get into arguments about joining a bunch of idiots calling themselves “Wolverines,” “Rebel Alliance,” or “Ghostbusters.” Most of all, these bands of survivors were sloppy. Every few hours, somebody somewhere would radio in for help because somebody else was bitten, or missing, or they were surrounded. And then the other groups would fall silent for a while, because in the end, even if they were playing at being soldiers, they were merely informal bands of people trying to survive.
A variety of survival tactics had been adopted, with mixed success. Those that adopted a fortress approach did well at first; they were usually near the big population centers where the zombies were thickest. But supplies were running out.
There were others that kept moving, the way Danny had wanted to do with her own convoy out of Forest Peak. But everybody was reliving The Road Warrior now that they knew the infrastructure was gone. Gangs were forming, casual alliances of hard-asses looking not only to survive, but to prosper. They were looting, they were raiding encampments, they were raping and killing. Danny knew her tribe back at Boscombe Field wouldn’t last half an hour against these marauders.
There was something else, but Danny assumed it wasn’t significant: A couple of groups had said they found help. Both of them dropped out of radio contact immediately afterward. Danny wondered what kind of help they had found. She didn’t intend to find out. For once, Danny was placing a high price on her own life: Without it, she could never find Kelley. Still, there was a foul twist in her gut when she heard those Mayday calls on the radio and maintained her own silence. She was the Sheriff of Nowhere.
The last of the supplies Danny laid in was a case of bourbon.
Danny drank her way northward, drawing lines on her map.
2
Long before she could see the city, Danny could smell the smoke, and then Danny saw the thick sooty band along the horizon, and then she was chugging along the built-up waterfront toward San Francisco. The air stank of smoke and decomposition. The city was on fire. But it was not burning where she was going.
Danny had stopped at a deserted little beachfront hamlet, hardly a town, about ten miles south of San Francisco. All the seaworthy boats in the place were gone, but she had found an unwieldy, twelve-foot Jon boat, too big to row, with the engine removed for servicing. Danny found a clamp-on outboard in a crate at the marina’s machine shop. She was fairly sure she had attached it wrong, but the propeller reached into the water and the gas line flowed okay, so she fired the motor up and aimed the craft north.
She brought the fishing boat into a notch at the throat of Pier 45, which a large Victorian-style signboard proclaimed to be Fisherman’s Wharf. The pier was defended by a bow-shaped breakwater of concrete. In modern times it had become a parking spot for privately owned pleasure craft and charter boats. As Danny had discovered elsewhere during her two-day journey along the coast, everything on the water with sails or an engine had long since been piloted away; the water was the only safe route out of the city. God only knew what had happened to all the boat people. Maybe they starved. Maybe they were all in a fleet, headed for Hawaii to start a new society based on peace and understanding.
Danny was surprised at the small scale of the pier’s marina. Fewer than a hundred slips. In San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, there were tens of thousands of places to keep a boat. Here in San Francisco these few precious slips were open for the taking for probably the first time in memory—not a rowing dinghy remained. The water was deep and mysterious and thick with effluent from the city. Not just ordinary urban flotsam, but oily sludge, ashes, and charred refuse, the drainage of a vast wound. Bags and backpacks bobbed in the tide. Shoes and shirts. Toys. A human head drifted past, mouth sagging into the water as if to drink the sea. The water stank so badly she could taste the smell.
Danny nosed the boat toward a makeshift barbed-wire fence that lined Jefferson Street at the water’s edge, where several men in improvised commando costumes stood with weapons raised. They were armed with shotguns and rifles and looked as if killing was little more than expediency now, stripped of meaning. Danny knew the look well. She was wearing it herself.
“Don’t shoot yet,” the one man without a long gun said. He carried a pistol, and he appeared to be in charge, based upon his irritated expression.
“It’s a zero,” one of the others said, a young man in a black beret. “Look at it.”
“Zeros can’t drive a boat,” the man in charge said.
“What’s a zero?” she called, killing the engine. Her voice relaxed their trigger fingers a little. They did not respond. The boat ground up against the concrete a few moments later. At a gesture from the man in charge, the others stepped through a gap in the fence and Danny was hauled up by her arms onto the pier.
The silence was filled with questions. Back here among the living, Danny realized, she knew nothing. Half a dozen pairs of eyes with complex, working brains behind them, not just dead nerves and teeth. She would have to relearn how to interact, and what was going on, and who was in charge. It wouldn’t be her for a while. She would have to play along. She would have to remember to fear a gun in the hands of an amateur.
Right now she was too tired to care. They were pathetic, these men. Like the hunters that came from the city to shoot deer up in Forest Peak, barely capable of not shooting themselves, let alone bagging game. That these people were salty after a few days of mass murder didn’t make them soldiers.
“You bit?” the man in charge said to Danny.
“No.”
“You look bit.”
“Fuck you, cocksucker,” Danny exclaimed, forgetting her nonconfrontational strategy.
“I’m Mitchell Gold,” the man in charge said. “This is my part of the perimeter.” He drew a compact satellite transmitter from his back belt and spoke into it. Danny thought she would very much like one of those radios. She would like some technological edge. A clue. Anything.