Rise Again (29 page)

The two zombies, the man and the girl, had wandered listlessly along the wire for a couple of hours, but showed no intelligence at all. They clutched at the fence mesh and hung their mouths open and moaned periodically, staring at the lights that burned in the buildings, but they didn’t have the wits to creep toward the gate, or climb over or dig under the fence.

Danny was also keeping herself scarce because she didn’t want to listen to the compliments and enthusiasms of her motley band of survivors. Some of them, like Michelle and her brother Jimmy James, remained subdued, their grief still fresh. The college-age couple, Martin and the girl, whose name Danny was not surprised to find was Pfeiffer, were also sad and kept mostly to themselves, sitting on the brown Naugahyde couch in the rec room with their backs to four shelves full of
National Geographic
and aviation magazines.

At last, however, most of them were upstairs or in the rec room and Danny was able to slip unobserved into the aviatrix’s room, where Amy was luxuriating under an old-fashioned sunflower showerhead. Danny pulled off her boots and unbuttoned her shirt, but she didn’t want to stand around naked in front of the big mirror on the wall over the sinks. She wanted to get straight into the shower.

“Hey, Amy,” she said. Amy jumped, spun around, and wiped the suds out of her eyes.

“Don’t scare me! I have this fear thing.”

“Sorry,” Danny said. She contemplatively picked a couple of chunks of fried hair off her head. She glanced sidelong at the mirror and saw what the others saw: She was an apparition, covered in dirty, peeling skin, the flesh red and raw underneath. Lips like fried bacon. No eyebrows, no eyelashes, her hair a mass of rusty gristle, burned to stubble in front. Her ragged uniform was so filthy it looked like camouflage cloth.

“What,” Amy said.

“You read Kelley’s note, right?”

Amy rinsed the shampoo out of her hair, bent double so the water ran her hair into a point that hung from her forehead. She didn’t answer right away. Danny figured she was trying to second-guess which one of the five hundred points addressed in the note Danny wanted to discuss.

“Yeah,” Amy said, drawing the middle of the word out into a question.

“Are you really into women?” Danny asked.

“Not if they smell like you,” Amy said.

In the end, Danny had to shower with the water almost entirely cold; her skin was so thoroughly burned, scraped, cut, and bruised that the hot water felt like boiling pickle juice. Still, she stayed under the cool spray for a long time, allowing the dead skin to soak off and gently working out the worst of the burnt parts of her hair. Then she put on the clothes Amy had gathered for her: an extra-large T-shirt that went to her knees, and a pair of disposable Tyvek painter’s pants from one of the hangars.

Stinging all over, but much refreshed, Danny allowed Amy to lead her to the motor home, inside which Patrick intended to stay the night now that it was safely behind a fence.

It was around 10:00
P.M
., with a deep black sky frosted with stars overhead. A man named Simon, an accountant by trade, was taking first watch up in the control tower. Beyond the gates, Danny’s interceptor was parked facing down the long slope of Boscombe Field Road: she had decided to leave it out there, she explained to the others, to serve as an indication that someone was in residence at the airfield. Depending on the motives of such travelers as might happen by, it would serve as a welcome—or a warning. The zombies wouldn’t care.

“Look at you,” Patrick said, spreading his arms and smiling. Danny was touched to realize he was genuinely pleased to see her. There were bags under his eyes and his skin was chalky. But he’d put on a clean shirt from one of the hidden closets in the bedroom, there was music playing low and soft on the seven-channel sound system, and the interior of the White Whale was invitingly clean and orderly. Danny saw a small framed picture of Weaver on the wet bar. There was a narrow black ribbon draped across one corner of the frame.

Patrick gave Danny a hug, rubbing her back. Then he held her at arm’s length and looked straight into her eyes with a look of concern he’d perfected on television when revealing to hapless homeowners that they had made fatal decorating decisions.

“Sheriff D., I have to ask you something embarrassing.”

“Okay,” Danny said, thinking,
This is the night for embarrassing questions
. Amy was looking in the fridge of the galley kitchen.

“What,” Patrick asked, “did you do to your back?”

Danny felt her face go hot and redder than ever. She looked around for help. Amy was scrupulously avoiding eye contact, head halfway into the fridge.

“I got burned,” Danny said. “In Iraq.”

Patrick nodded. “So that’s why there’s a running joke about ‘you got wounded but you won’t say where’?”

“Yeah. They all know I broke my leg, but they don’t know what else. When I say ‘they,’ I mean back in Forest Peak.”

“Have you ever heard of ‘La Mer’? It’s a skin cream.”

Patrick bustled off to the bathroom and emerged with a small jar.

“This stuff is a hundred twenty bucks an ounce. Great for scars, burns, the works.”

“Amy gave me this stuff called ‘Bag Balm.’ It’s like five bucks a pound.”

Amy chimed in: “It’s for cow udders, but it greases up the old scorcheroos on Danny, too. I don’t think that Mer stuff would last for more than a day. Show him, Danny. It’s amazing.”

“Uh, no,” Danny said.

Patrick made a face and set the jar down in front of Danny, who was now sitting on one of the bar stools. Danny indicated the bottles locked in the cabinet behind the bar.

“You got any Black Label?”

“I can’t believe it,” he said, his eyes growing wet.

“What.”

“The only reason I have Black Label is Weaver liked it.”

“Peas in a pod,” Danny said, thirsting for a drink. She watched Patrick fool around with glasses and ice cubes for what felt like a year and a half, but at last she had the drink in front of her, swizzle stick and paper napkin and everything, like in a real bar. Amy was sitting on the couch by now, head tipped back. Danny drank most of the scotch and then pretended to savor the rest.

“So what brings you estimable ladies to my humble abode?” Patrick asked, fussing around. He was getting self-conscious, Danny saw. She hated that. She wanted to relax, and he was feeling awkward.

“I’m looking to feel normal for a few minutes. You have a drink, too,” Danny suggested. “These may be the last ice cubes on earth.”

Two hours later, the three of them were fairly well plastered.

Troy Huppert lay on his bunk with an open window beside his head, listening to faint sounds of revelry coming from the RV. It was good to know that Danny Adelman was letting what was left of her hair down. They all needed her to take care of herself, and that included R&R. Troy liked her as a person. She’d been one of the first people to welcome him to Forest Peak
and mean it. But Troy also needed Danny to keep herself alive and functional for another, more selfish reason: He was probably second in line to command the group, if Danny was out of commission.

Troy was a capable leader and an effective part of any team, but he never imposed his personality on a situation. That came from the inner-city upbringing. You could join the ever-escalating gangsta sweepstakes and walk with the most elaborate bop, wear the latest fashions, and live in a state of crippling self-consciousness at all times, or you could fade into the background and make your small plans to get out of town.

Contrary to popular imagery, life in Watts wasn’t, for most people, a battle with gangs, drugs, and the lure of easy money. There
was
such a battle, and it was waged right out in front of decent folks’ homes, but most of them weren’t involved in the party. Most of them were living three generations to a house, putting together an income one month at a time. The problem was jobs. If you wanted to work, you spent half your time finding it and the other half doing it.

Troy had gotten out of town. Way out of town, until he was what his grandmother referred to as a “nigro pioneer.” He was living up in a remote, wild place where most people were white. He was trailblazing. It wasn’t intentional. He’d never even heard of Forest Peak. He had been a trainee at the fire station five blocks from the house he grew up in. There was a notice on the bulletin board: summer training program for wilderness fire-fighting. That was where the overtime was. Fighting blazes during the ever-worsening wildfire seasons, deep in the mountains where rich idiots built mansions. He was in.

Two years later, he was still in, and settled in Forest Peak. No mansions there. But every morning he woke up feeling free. Who gave a damn if he was the only brother in town? The other dudes at the firehouse knew he was cooler than them. They welcomed the change. And he knew somebody had helped make all that possible: The locals figured if they could have a lady sheriff, they could even have a colored fireman.

But now it was only the lady sheriff between him and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis. He didn’t feel like he was ready for it. Amy the veterinarian was Danny’s understudy, but she wasn’t a leader. She was the sidekick type. Troy listened to the faraway laughter and wondered how many of them would be called to lead, regardless of their qualifications, as the boldest among them continued to die.

•

Danny woke up suddenly from a dreamless sleep. The sun was slanting in through the windows. The air-conditioning hummed in the ceiling. She was disoriented for a few seconds: strange bed, strange room. Then she understood where she was: she’d passed out inside the motor home. It was morning. She was still alive, so her schedule of watches must have been kept overnight. A surge of panic hit her, but she stayed still. If something was wrong, she would have heard about it. Boscombe Field was apparently still peaceful. Danny yawned and stretched, which hurt all over. Then she rolled over and saw, on the bedside console, the empty jar of La Mer cream.

She stumbled down the short passage past the bathroom into the living area of the RV, the empty jar in her hand. Patrick was lying on the converted sofa bed, watching a movie on the big TV that flipped out of the bulkhead wall. The sound was almost inaudible. Danny ran her fingers through her hair and realized her scalp felt cool and her fingers were running through a downy layer of short fluff, not hair.

“Good morning,” Patrick said, as Danny ducked back into the bathroom for a look in the triple-view mirror. Someone had cut her hair to about half an inch long, all over her head. Only in a few places was there any trace of the burning.

“Did you cut my hair?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” Patrick said. “I had to wait till you passed out, though.”

“And what about this?” She emerged from the bathroom and held up the cream jar in what she hoped was an accusatory manner.

“It’s empty,” Patrick said. The movie on the TV was in black and white and Gregory Peck was in it. He was a submarine captain. Danny had no idea what movie it was; the only thing she’d seen Gregory Peck in was
The Omen
, on television. Her father had let her stay up late to watch it.

“Yes,” said Danny. “I noticed that, too. And I was wondering where all that cream went.”

“On you, of course. Your arms, your face, and your back.”

“So you’ve seen my back?”

“And more. You have no secrets from me, Sheriff D.”

Danny’s face turned red. She was blushing so hard her ears were hot.
Way to go, have a blackout in front of people
, the voice said. And:
Now he knows you’re deformed
.

“I must have passed out.”

“It was your idea to put the cream on,” Patrick said. “You ate some of it,
if I remember right. But the haircut was my idea. I didn’t want you shedding all over the bed.”

There was no judgment in his voice, he had no problem making eye contact, and if he felt any kind of revulsion for Danny’s condition, he was hiding it extremely well. Which Danny knew by now he was incapable of. So, incredibly, he must have had no problem with it.

“It’s disgusting,” Danny said. “My back.”

“It’s impressive,” Patrick said. “I assume you got burned in the line of duty?”

“Yeah. Hit an IED—an improvised bomb—on the side of the road in Basra. Blew our M3 Bradley upside down, with me in it. My buddy Harlan got thrown out, except for part of his brain that stayed with me. Fuckin’ thing caught fire, so I crawled out and went after Harlan and I didn’t even know I was on fire until one of the other guys started throwing dirt on me.”

As she spoke, Danny felt an immense, almost physical weight lift inside her, like an iron plate that had been clamped down on some part of her mind. A sore, cramped, mental limb was free again that had been bent double all this time. She had never told anybody outside the military exactly what had happened that day, not even Amy. Now, in a few words, it was out. She was trusting Patrick with things she didn’t trust to herself, and she didn’t know why. Along with the rush of freedom inside her came a rush of fear, like parachuting for the first time.

“Don’t tell anybody,” she said, too quickly. It felt ridiculous to have said it, and she understood on some level that she was letting Patrick down, dishonoring him by doubting her own trust in him. “I mean I know you won’t, but I never—”

Patrick raised a languid hand.

“Lie down, I’m safe,” he said, and patted the bed beside him. Danny took a chair by the bed. It was the best she could do.

“What movie is that?” she said, desperate to change the subject.

“
On the Beach
. Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. And Anthony Perkins one year before
Psycho
, with the worst Australian accent you ever heard. It’s about the end of the world, this cloud of radiation that circles the planet and kills everybody except in Australia, where they have a few extra months. And it’s what they do with their time until the cloud comes.”

“No shit. How can you watch that?”

“Under the circumstances? I’m looking for ideas.”