Rise Again (16 page)

And Larry never got tired; he never stopped moving.

During the exam, Weaver was initially paying close attention, studying the corpse wriggling under his hands. He could see razor stubble on the face. The skin was ash-colored, almost metallic. There were tiny dark veins under the surface that caused this appearance, he could see that much. The mouth didn’t seem to be wet, the tongue the color of day-old fried steak. The teeth looked unnaturally yellow, almost like kernels of corn, probably because the cold blue-tinged flesh made them look that way by contrast, not because they’d changed color. Patrick often delivered long sermons on how color worked. Weaver would grunt in response, although it was all actually kind of interesting. He simply didn’t feel like he was qualified to remark.

And the eyes—Weaver couldn’t look into them, although even when he made eye contact with the thing, there wasn’t any real recognition. It was as if someone had injected watered-down skim milk inside the eyeball. But the most disturbing part was the way the eyes would roam around the space, almost blindly, but then fix upon a human face and stare intently.

Weaver looked away, and found himself staring at Patrick, standing there with the notebook and pen in a strange pose with his shoulders halfway up to his ears and his knees pressed together. Weaver was worried about him. Patrick had far more strength than he himself suspected, but he was so invested in
reacting
to everything, so into the drama, that you couldn’t tell where the real feelings started and the theatricality ended. Then again, that was one of the things Weaver liked about him.

Weaver thought of himself as inhibited, bottled up. Patrick was practically inside-out. Right now the poor guy looked like he couldn’t decide whether to puke or faint, although at present the corpse’s wife was outmatching him in the histrionics department.
Out-Hecuba Hecuba
, Weaver remembered. From the Shakespeare play
Hamlet
. Patrick (who had designed the sets for a production of the play, not long after they first met) had explained who Hecuba was to Weaver, although Weaver promptly forgot. Patrick had a wide range of subjects he was intelligent in, including classical theater. Alan Rickman was playing Polonius in that show, and Weaver dug Rickman a lot, he remembered that, too. They shook hands at one of the after-parties. Hecuba was a lot like Larry’s wife.

It popped into Weaver’s head that gay marriage was no longer going to be the hot-button relationship issue in society. Marriages between living and dead people, like what they were witnessing now, would be the new crisis. The Catholic Church was going to have a field day with this. Was Alan Rickman still alive? Weaver cleared his mind.
I’m babbling
, he thought.

When Amy was done, despite the protestations of Mrs. Larry, Troy and Weaver got her husband back on his feet and pushed him outside, into the parking lot. They closed the doors as the corpse lumbered toward the living again. “You can’t do this, it’s a free country!” the woman protested.

“Dead people don’t have human rights,” Troy said, and went off to the men’s room to wash his hands. Mrs. Larry didn’t volunteer to be out there alone with her husband, Amy observed.

In the Sheriff’s Station, Danny told Maria everything was under control and went out the back way. This made Maria think everything was not under control, because it was the same thing
she
said when the taxi dispatching went to pieces at work. She wondered if her husband was out there, and if he was, how were they going to get through this? He was always in some kind of situation. Now he was probably dead and even then she couldn’t rely on him to behave. She swallowed her grief and rolled the radio band selector along the frequencies, searching for life. The red-haired sheriff was doing her best.

Moving down the alley, Danny felt the same flutter of panic she’d experienced the previous night when she walked toward Main Street in the dark and wondered if anyone else in the world was alive.

Right after her parents died she’d had a series of dreams like that, people leaving without telling her, finding herself lost in places like schools and hospitals, empty except for her.

Then she saw the girl with blue hair.

She was crouched between two of the cars that formed the nearest side of the barricade, her arms folded around her bony knees. She was watching the trapped infecteds jostling each other. Danny crossed to the girl and the smell of the stale bodies in the midday sun was stifling. “Which one are you looking at?” Danny asked, because the girl’s eyes were following one of the things.

“My mom,” she said, and pointed to a dumpy middle-aged woman with a perm. The dead woman stared into the middle distance, unaware of her child.

“Where did the others go?”

“To the school gym, the black guy said.”

“The fireman?”

The girl fell back into silence. Danny knew she ought to make introductions, find out the girl’s name, but she didn’t want to personalize anybody. They were generic civilians until further notice. Until, if she was honest with herself, she was sure people would stop dying. Danny glanced up and found the girl’s mother was facing them, although the dead eyes still didn’t seem to have registered the presence of the living women. Danny needed to give this girl a project, and fast. It wasn’t any good for her to fixate on a dead person, regardless of who it was. Danny said, “You have a brother, right?”

“Jimmy James.”

“I’m going to need your help. Somebody has to look out for him, and I’m too busy.”

The girl focused her eyes on Danny for the first time. She was naturally fair, with pale eyelashes and tiny, even freckles. She appeared to be assessing whether Danny was bullshitting her so she would move along, which Danny was. The girl didn’t answer, but returned to watching her mother. Danny tried again.

“Look, I’m real sorry about your mom. This situation blows for everybody. But I can’t leave you here, understand? I can’t. And in a couple of days when the rest of us are down at the rescue center in the valley and you’re all out of potato chips and these folks start to rot, I think you’re going to wish you had come with me.”

The girl looked as if Danny had slapped her face. Her eyes watered, then tears began to spill down her cheeks and her chin puckered up and she started to bawl. Danny grabbed her and held her head against her chest, and wished it was Kelley she was holding. The girl wept until Danny’s shirt was wet through. Danny felt the sting of tears she had yet to cry herself, but there was an ocean of those inside her somewhere.

Then they got moving, scrambling over the alley fence into the bushes, then along through the brush until they crossed Pine Street.

The dead were everywhere, swarming.

They seemed to be moving a little faster than before. Maybe the heat of
the sun activated them, like lizards. But they also seemed to take a greater interest in the pair of living beings who were now tacking through them, back and forth, looking for the clearest path.

Danny led the blue-haired girl along behind the houses on the other side of Pine Street, then they emerged from cover into a fenced yard. The yard formed a clearing in a forest of terrible swaying bodies. Beyond it was the north end of Main Street, and across the intersection was the gymnasium. The street and the parking lot were both crowded with the undead. Almost all of them were facing the gymnasium. Danny got Troy on the radio.

“Troy, gimme a 10–66.”

Troy answered in a low, confidential voice, slightly muffled as if he had his hand over his mouth.

“We’re okay here, we have the doors locked, the place is secure. But we’re outnumbered, as you probably noticed. And there’s a woman here flipping out because her husband is outside.”

“Is he alive?”

“No.”

“I’m across Main Street. The situation looks like it might be devolving. We need to get the survivors out of town. That big motor home, it’s not far from the door. That guy Weaver has the keys. I’m guessing it will hold thirty people, packed in pretty good. How many have you got?”

“That’s the good news,” Troy said. “A bunch of folks bugged out not five minutes ago, they took some trucks and a van and went up 144. So I got a dozen or so, and Amy just came in with five. They’re freaked out. I can understand the feeling. What’s your situation, Sheriff?”

My situation is fucked
, she wanted to say.
Thanks for asking
. But she replied, “I have a girl here—”

“Michelle,” the blue-haired girl supplied.

“Named Michelle,” Danny continued, “and Maria back at the station. I don’t know where the Wolfman is, unless you have him.” Danny suddenly had a rough idea what to do next. “Okay, here’s what I want to do. We get everybody we can into that motor home, maybe put anybody extra onto Eugene the Treeman’s flatbed, and we bug out of here ourselves. Get on up to Big Bear. They’re going to have thousands of refugees on their hands, but with our uniforms we might be able to get some love. Any objections? Over.”

Troy didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then: “Refugees…Damn. Yeah, I’m ready to split town. We can put up a sign so whoever’s hiding in their
basement around here can follow us up when they get the balls. Ah hell, 10-6, over.”

Ten-six:
stand by
. Danny heard some noise in the background over the radio, then the channel went silent. Seconds later, she could hear shouting, and one of the doors of the gymnasium flew open. A woman ran out, crying, “Larry! Larry, where are you?” The woman rushed into the thick of the walking dead and Danny lost sight of her. A moment later, Troy emerged. When he saw the increase in the number of the infected, he stopped moving and backed up against the building. Danny waved over the heads of the walking dead. “Troy, over here.” He waved back and pressed the radio to his face.

“Sheriff, you want me to get her or leave her? Out.”

“I got her, you keep the rest from panicking, out.” Danny turned to Michelle. “Follow me close,” she said.

They went back the way they came.

Danny pushed through the front door of the sheriff’s station into Main Street where the dead were milling around, drugged eyes following her as she bounded down the steps and into the mass of bodies. The girl Michelle stayed behind, and Danny could hear Maria speaking to her, probably glad to have someone around who was a little warmer than Danny. She could hear Larry’s woman calling for her husband in the crowd; she hadn’t found him yet, and predictably he wasn’t responding. Danny shoved her way among the repulsive things, their stink of excrement and old fish making her throat close. She had smelled terrible things in her life, foremost of all the savory stench of burning flesh, but this smell wasn’t only disgusting, it was alien. She’d never experienced anything like it before. Her stomach roiled. Then another voice joined the frantic cries of Larry’s wife.

“Danny, where the heck are you?” It was Amy.

Danny shoved through the corpses as through immense slugs, repulsed by the touch of them but unwilling to allow herself any squeamishness. Touch them and be damned. Get to Amy. It was slow going, though: The dead were more active than before, groping, clutching at her uniform, as if wanting her to stay.

They met in the street in front of the Junque Shoppe. Danny saw the reanimated highway patrolman shamble past, and behind him the now-dead mullet man with the FUCK T-shirt. Somehow his lower lip had been torn off, hanging now by a scrap of flesh at one side. His teeth showed through.
Then there was Amy, emerging through the crowd behind him, trying not to touch the infected but getting squeezed anyway as they lurched into each other.

“Nice to see someone alive,” Amy said. “Have you seen another live woman in a yellow polo shirt?”

“She’s over there,” Danny said, and hooked her chin down the street. “Let’s get her. I want everybody out of town in half an hour.”

The two women moved away through the silent, shuffling crowd, Danny in the lead, Amy following with her hands up at her shoulders as if she’d seen a mouse, not a thousand reanimated corpses.

“He’s not dead!”

There was Larry’s wife, pointing accusatorily between Amy and dead Lawrence, as if she’d caught them in an affair.

“I know he’s moving, but he’s not alive. We can’t leave him in the gym.” Amy was pleading, something that never worked, in Danny’s experience.

So Danny stepped in between husband and wife. She took a deep breath. One more try. Her patience was all dried up. She took hold of the wife’s arm.

“It’s not her fault, ma’am. State regulations. Let’s get back—”

“There’s no such regulation!”

Amy took the woman’s other arm, and she and Danny began to gently propel her toward the gym. The zombies—
hell, that’s what they are
, Danny thought—were coming uncomfortably close to them as they argued. Others were following the survivors toward the gym, and still more were emerging from the trees, from doorways, from behind the buildings. Hundreds of them. Amy continued to reason with the woman, who was gibbering with upset, tears flowing down her cheeks.

Then she lunged forward, teeth bared, an inch from Amy’s startled face: “If he isn’t alive, why is he walking down the street? What kind of doctor are you, anyway, if you can’t tell the difference between alive and dead?”

Danny pulled the woman back, but she shook Danny off and chugged straight down the street toward her Larry, calling out his name. Danny caught Amy’s wrist:
Let her go
. She didn’t want a hysteric in the gymnasium anyway, if she was going to stir up the others. Just as Danny was about to suggest they start the move out of town, Danny’s radio squawked.

“There is a new message recording. I think it is urgent,” Maria said.

“Not something for the open radio?” Danny asked, speaking into her shoulder mic.

“No,” Maria said. She sounded afraid.

“We’ll be right there,” Danny said. “We’re pulling out of town, get ready to move.”

She didn’t care where they went, as long as it was free of dead people. Then Patrick and Weaver appeared behind them.