Rise Again (43 page)

Danny had come to the literal border between life and death.

She climbed out of the Humvee, her rifle swinging casually within a few degrees of the men she was with. They stood around, waiting for someone. The man with the chin beard spoke into his radio again. Danny very much wanted one of those radios. She also wanted one of the machine guns. Most of all, however, she wanted to not be standing here where the roar of the fires and the moaning of the undead mingled on the hot gusting breeze. The air was pregnant with combustion, as if it might itself burst into sheets of flame, so full of gas and heat.

This
, Danny thought,
is the apocalypse
.

These were the possibilities: First, they would shoot her on the spot. In that case she was going to try to take out a couple of them before she died. Not much of a plan.

Next option: They were going to send her out there to die. In that case she would simply follow her original plan: run like hell. This plan lacked detail.

The third possibility was that they wanted her to look at the situation they were in, and suggest some strategic ideas based on her experiences out there on the other side of the line. That was the most logical conclusion to come to, and the least likely scenario as far as Danny was concerned. Nobody, in her considerable experience, did anything for good, logical reasons; they did things based on their own narrow preconceived ideas of how the world ought to work.

It might only be that. But Danny could feel the presence of death.

After she and her escort had stood in the sickly glow of the battery lamps long enough to gather a fresh coat of ash, a new variable entered the intersection.

It was a motorcycle, some kind of fast Japanese thing covered in plastic fairings. The rider let the bike drop on its side and walked away from it; it was nothing but a tool. Danny noticed that Chin-beard and the rest of the men around her stiffened at the approach of this figure. They didn’t come to attention; the slack simply pulled out of their postures. They were tense. Danny held her rifle carelessly, as before, but her muscles were taut. If this was the executioner, she was taking the first shot.

As the rider approached, emerging from firelit outline into dimensional
figure, Danny thought Death himself would have approved. Maybe this was the presence she felt.

He was clad entirely in leather. Against human teeth, there were no vulnerable points on this man. He was sealed into a thick, scraped-up leather riding suit, stiff with crash pads. The boots were overkill, Danny decided. About fifty buckled straps from knee to toe, which meant they were heavy as hell, and inflexible. But Danny thought the elbow-length gauntlets were a great idea. The man looked like a lean, black alligator, seamed and stitched with zippers. On his head he wore a yellow plastic construction helmet over a leather aviator’s cap, ski goggles, and a respirator. Around his waist was a belt bristling with ugly instruments for piercing and striking, and a holster containing what looked like a Luger automatic from the Second World War.

For a few seconds, Danny was intimidated by this bizarre, invulnerable creature that strode toward her. In the next moment, it was all she could do not to laugh. He looked like he was late for a Halloween party as much as anything else. Very
Beyond Thunderdome
. He was so heavily clad he couldn’t move half as fast as Danny, he probably couldn’t hear very well, and his peripheral vision was shit. She could fuck this guy up.

The apparition before her pulled the face-concealing respirator down, and Danny got her next surprise. It was a woman. The tool belt and leathers had hidden her shape. The woman snapped the ski goggles up over the brim of the safety helmet and stared around at the men in the party, then examined Danny like a conquest of battle. Danny didn’t say anything or show any reaction, her expression bland.

“So you’re the tough guy,” she purred. “They call me the Zero Killer.” Her voice was like honey and bourbon. Pitched low. Her face was clean and smooth where the soot couldn’t reach, a tribal pattern of grit marking the narrow, exposed margins between goggles and mask. Chin-beard hawked and spat into the feathery ash at their feet. He thumbed in Danny’s direction.

“She don’t know shit about the mission. Figured you could tell her,” he said. He was being evasive, Danny thought. So there was going to be a big lie in the next part of the conversation, or maybe something was going to happen. This was exactly how people died. Your executioner turns out to be a bondage chick, you let your guard down, and you’re dead. Danny couldn’t let it happen like that. The woman turned squarely to Danny, dismissing the
men from her attention; they kept standing around, their roles subtly shifted to that of entourage.

“Heard you fought your way up here from L.A.,” the woman said.

“Yeah,” Danny said. “What’s up?” She didn’t want to fuck around.
If this is it, let’s get to the fighting
. She was getting tired from the long period of keeping her body tensed for the defense.

“I have an assignment out there,” the woman said, “but I can’t do it alone. It takes four hands. So far, everybody’s died before we reach the objective. Not that I blame them.”

“Huh,” Danny said. The absurdity of her position was making her careless, but she couldn’t find the edge. She was sinking into a state of disbelief. She might as well be talking to Bozo the Clown about a trip to the moon. But if this assignment would get Danny out of the city—

“You’re smiling. What’s funny?” the leatherwoman said.

“I just remembered an old joke,” Danny said, no longer interested in these people. They weren’t going to kill her, at least not on the spot. They had some elaborate plan worked out. Get Danny’s back turned and sic some zombies on her a mile out there in the wasteland, for whatever reason. Shoot her in the head on a long walk to some photo opportunity the senator thought she’d enjoy seeing. Danny now realized she was more interested in
why
all this was happening than
what
was supposed to happen next. Which, of course, could be fatal. She focused her attention again.
Stay on point. You against the world. Starting with these weirdos
.

The men who flanked Danny were shifting uneasily. This woman clearly scared the shit out of them. Danny decided to dial the amusement back. Play the seasoned professional angle. Make Ms. Thunderdome feel like she was with an equal. Danny spoke into the silence.

“Look, I was walking the beat, these boys drug me all the way to the back of beyond here, and I don’t know a goddamn thing. So how about you tell me what’s happening? Because we’re wasting time. I hate wasting time. Not much of it around.”

Half an hour later, Danny and the leather-bound Liz Magnussen, aka “Zero Killer,” were on their way into zombie territory. They had made a brief stop at a generator-powered construction trailer, where Danny was kitted up with gear: Over her uniform she wore a police-style motorcycle jacket of horsehide, yellow buckskin gloves, and a knit watch cap to keep her ears
tucked away—they had lost a lot of people to infected bites on the ears. Danny refused the heavy riding chaps, calf-length linesman’s boots, and leather skullcap. She gladly accepted one of the loaded belts of equipment they had hanging on coat pegs in the trailer.

It was a standard police belt with the basket-weave pattern stamped into it. The little sleeves that normally held pepper spray, spare clips, knife, and chewing gum had been opened up at the bottom to allow the shafts of weapons to pass through them. Other implements were held on with Velcro bands.

Magnussen demonstrated the use of them, with several admiring onlookers keeping well back. “We got some welding equipment and we’ve been making things up as we go along. This one is brand new—it’s a brain pick.” It was a steel bar with a cruciform end, each of the three tips of the cross sharpened like nails. “Thrust with the middle point. Go for the mouth. Up and in. Or you can swing it side to side like a hammer. I find it’s easier backhand than forehand. Female wrists,” she added, and a couple of the onlookers laughed.

Danny was intrigued by the woman’s face: She had a Scandinavian name, but she looked at least half Asian. Could have been a showgirl, except for the crooked nose and the old, white scar that ran along the top of her upper lip.

Magnussen went on: “These brain picks have changed the game. I carry four of them, you have three on you now. If they get stuck in a zero you definitely don’t want to dick around trying to pull one out while the rest are coming at you. Just grab another, like Kleenex.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Danny said, thinking how handy these things would have been the last couple of weeks. She didn’t notice that the attention in the trailer had shifted to her: In her element now, she sounded as tough and competent as the “Zero Killer.” No nerves, only professionalism.

Magnussen continued: “There’s a bunch of other pig-stickers on there as well. Jab ’em and leave ’em is my advice, but you can’t have too many weapons. One thing I found—aim for the nose. That slows the zeros down.”

Danny nodded. “They hunt by sense of smell. I think they can smell our breath. I noticed you stop breathing, their attention kind of wanders.”

Magnussen herself seemed impressed by this. “Right, exactly. That’s why I wear the respirator. Cuts down on my human signature.”

She detached another Velcro-affixed device from her belt, a length of
iron pipe with a small loop of wire at one end and a screw-on cap at the other. The onlookers shifted even further away. Danny figured that one for a homemade grenade. Magnussen had half a dozen of them along the back of her belt, which also made an effective kidney protector—assuming the wire loops didn’t get caught on something.

“Yank the wire and throw. Even if the wire doesn’t come all the way out, assume you have ten seconds. We make ’em long-fused because this isn’t man-to-man combat. This enemy never get out of the way when they see one coming. Filled with ball bearings or dimes. Who says money isn’t worth anything anymore?”

Everyone but Danny laughed at that.

“I want one of those radios, too,” Danny said, indicating Magnussen’s satellite unit. There was a rack of them charging on the wall.

“No can do,” a man said from the end of the trailer.

“Why not?” Danny asked. “This is life and death.”

“Because you are not authorized—” the man began. Magnussen interrupted him:

“Give her one, Sheldon. Set it to six-seven-seven.”

The man shrugged and complied. Danny took the precious radio and inserted it in her belt. But now Danny found her pants were coming down. She’d lost a lot of weight in all the excitement of the past couple of weeks. So she lightened her belt: One of the brain picks would do. All those other pointed weapons hanging down around her legs could end up in a self-inflicted wound that would leave her at the mercy of the zombies. She’d rather improvise than crawl. She’d done all her crawling elsewhere in the world.

Besides the brain picks, she kept four grenades and a big hunting knife. There were some other, more common implements: a multitool, a butane pencil torch, and a stubby high-intensity flashlight. She kept those, too.

“You aren’t equipped for the assignment,” Magnussen said, when Danny was done cutting down on her armament.

“Then why don’t you tell me just exactly what the fuck it is?” Danny said, and stepped outside.

They trudged through the rubble and charred remains of what had been the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. The corner where they crossed through the barricades was, to Danny’s grim amusement, the intersection of Guerrero and Army streets. César Chávez was in there somewhere but
the street-naming scheme didn’t make sense, major routes blending into each other at odd moments. They sprinted down Guerrero until it became San Jose Avenue and then walked for a long way through the predawn darkness.

Zeros were everywhere in the beginning. They were massed up behind the barricade and it took considerable diversion to get Magnussen and Danny over the wall without a horde of the moaning creatures descending on them in such numbers they couldn’t have gotten through. There was no question of using the gates—the zeros seemed to have figured out that was the way to the meat buffet.

“Anybody want anything while we’re out?” Magnussen quipped, and again the others laughed. “I’m going to be
famous
when this is over,” she whispered to Danny.
She’s an attention freak
, Danny realized.
She’s doing this like it’s a reality show
.

The situation was slipping into insanity. Reality was rapidly losing its hold on the world.

They had to go up and over the obstacle, cross a ladder laid horizontally to the upstairs window of an apartment building, and then emerge on a fire escape on the opposite side. By that time they were a block away from where their confederates were acting as decoys, shouting and throwing debris at the undead.

Danny wasn’t sure the survivors should have been taunting such a huge crowd of the things: It seemed to energize the zeros, to make them throw themselves at the barrier. But diversion was the only way to get past them. What was most disturbing about the hellish scene—besides the hideous burns and injuries evident on so many of the undead—was the way the zombies were streaming toward the barricade from all quarters of the city.

Danny and Magnussen ran for the first quarter-mile once they hit the pavement below the fire escape, their flashlight beams whirling. There was no other way to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer number of their enemy. It pleased Danny to observe she had better endurance than her counterpart, and it wasn’t only the heavy Road Warrior boots. Danny was more fit.

They were headed for what Magnussen called “280.” In Los Angeles it was
the
405 or
the
134. Here they only said the number, which was confusing.
The
280 ran diagonally from the southwest to the northeast of the city, heading for Oakland. The mission was fairly simple, but it had so far
claimed a number of qualified lives—Magnussen had made it by herself as far as their goal, but one person couldn’t simultaneously take care of business and take care of herself. She’d heard from the people “back at command” that Danny’s exploits had marked her as maybe the best potential scout to have entered the city since the fall of Chinatown.