Rise Again (46 page)

“Don’t you fucking look at me, faggot,” Ace said.

“Why, does it turn you on?” Patrick replied, and continued on his way into the rec room. He didn’t hear Ace coming until it was too late. Suddenly Patrick was spun around and a fist crashed into his nose and blood spewed out of it and Patrick was stumbling backward, his hands at his face. Ace punched him again, in the belly, and when Patrick jackknifed, the wind knocked out of him, Ace grabbed the smaller man’s hair and propelled his skull into the wall, caving in the plaster.

Patrick collapsed. After he didn’t get up for fifteen minutes, Amy was called in. She didn’t know how bad the damage was, but Patrick was practically comatose, so she went to Murdo.

“Boys will be boys,” Murdo said, when he’d heard the story.

“You can’t let this happen,” Amy said. “You have to punish that Ace of yours. Otherwise something worse is going to happen. Patrick might be brain-damaged.”

“His kind are all brain-damaged,” Murdo said, but agreed to let Amy move Patrick out to the White Whale, just to make sure none of the men decided to take another crack at him.

It was civilians who carried Patrick out to the motor home. Michelle volunteered to stay and watch over him. Jimmy James went with her. Amy was relieved at this, at least: Michelle was definitely in danger around these men, and her brother might be next in line for a beating. They could play computer games and listen to Patrick try to breathe.

Amy got the wounded man arranged on his bed, and although she couldn’t reset the shattered bones of his nose, she was able to pry open an airway through the damage on either side, using a tongue depressor and wads of gauze pushed up into his nostrils. His face was a terrible mess. Both eyes were swelling up. He was probably better off unconscious.

Back in the terminal, the day wore on forever.

The survivors were dividing into uneasy factions now: Some wanted to
do
something about the situation; others wanted to try to make nice with
the Hawkstone men; and the rest didn’t want to do anything. They wanted to sulk in silence, if only because it bothered the hell out of
Turdo
, as the women had taken to calling him.

Juan kept fawning over Boudreau and the rest; at one point Maria happened to walk past him and let loose a low, rapid stream of Spanish that sounded like a lot of dirty words to Amy. Juan cringed and scuttled away. Amy was sympathetic to Juan’s plight: He was eligible for the next beating, if Jimmy James and Patrick weren’t around. He was also the next one in line to get sent out into the wasteland, if the mercenaries decided to get rid of anybody else. Juan would do anything to avoid that fate. Maybe even join the cause of his captors.

As it happened, the next victim was a woman.

It began at dawn with the screaming of the usually silent baby. Amy bolted out of the chair she was sleeping in. The baby was at the far end of the dormitory. Amy dashed down the aisle between the bunks and found the child alone in bed, wiggling his little arms and legs, his face a red, puckered ring around the screaming toothless mouth. The bedclothes were rumpled and still warm, but his mother was not there.

By now most of the women had gathered to see what was going on. Amy shoved through them—they would handle the baby, somehow; she didn’t know what to do except offer him a glass of water. She ran out of the room. There was no guard by the exterior door, only an empty chair. Amy tried to think what was happening. The washrooms. She turned on her heels and ran down the stairs toward the Aviatrix’s room, taking the steps three at a time.

The door was jammed shut. Amy shoved hard, shoved again. She could hear chair legs shuddering over the slick floor tiles. She kicked the door, and it squeaked open another inch. Now she could get her hand through the gap. She felt the back of a plastic stacking chair wedged under the door handle. Shook it free and swung the door open, just as Murdo and Ace came racing down from the men’s dormitory, guns in hand, wearing their cargo pants but no shirts or boots.

They could all see inside the bathroom. They all saw the same thing.

Murdo wasn’t going to be able to play this one as a he-said-she-said. Because Cammy was jammed up in the corner by the paper towel dispensers, and he—the Flamingo—was crushed up against her, one hand twisted down at her groin, the other at her throat. The woman was terrified, the whites showing all the way around her eyes. She looked at Amy and there
was pleading on her face, but silent pleading, because the Flamingo was choking her silent.

Amy didn’t make a plan. She simply grabbed the plastic chair, raised it over her left shoulder, and charged. She swung it at the pink-skinned, pink-haired man, her eyes fixed on the back of his neck.
I hope I kill him
, Amy thought, and an instant later the chair wasn’t in her hands.

She careened into the man, his hard muscles unyielding, and because the chair was gone she was off-balance and fell. She was back up on her knees within half a second. Flamingo hadn’t even turned all the way around. Amy started punching, aiming for his legs, his crotch, anything to stop him. He kicked her away before she landed a single worthwhile blow, and then strong hands were dragging her backward. Ace towed Amy along the floor with one hand twisted into her hair and the other hand shoving his pistol in her face. She could smell the tang of the gun oil. She was spitting with fury; injustice like a cliff towered above her and she wanted to smash it down. Flamingo, she saw, had turned to Murdo. Murdo was holding the chair he’d pulled out of Amy’s hands. There was a crazy daisy sticker on the chair.

Flamingo had his back to Cammy, his hands held out to Murdo, shaking his head in a now-let’s-be-reasonable kind of way, a bashful little smile on his piebald face. It might have ended there, boys will be boys, everybody back to your own beds. Except Cammy’s foot appeared from behind Flamingo, with the suddenness of a magic trick, in the fork between his legs. His trouser legs jumped halfway up his shins. The blow made a noise like a preacher whacking his Bible in midsermon.

“That’s for Patrick, you
asshole
!” Cammy shouted. Flamingo went down in slow motion, his neck rigged with tendons like a schooner in a high wind, teeth bared, eyes bulging. Ace let go of Amy’s hair. One moment Cammy was there, blazing with life, tall with defiance. The next moment there was a crisp, ear-splitting report that buzzed off the tiles, and the wall behind Cammy was blooming with red roses. Her head snapped back and she fell to the floor, dead. Flamingo lay on his side clutching his testicles while the blood flowed out of Cammy in the shape of a monstrous red hand, its fingers crawling along the grout lines, oozing toward the fallen man, as if to avenge its dead. Amy looked away.

Jones was leaning against the doorframe, his wounded leg held stiffly at an angle in front of him. His face was sheet-rumpled, his hair awry. He stared at the bloody scene, then spoke to Murdo: “Sir? What the
fuck
is going on?”

Danny tried to shout, but her voice was gone along with her strength. She didn’t want herself or Liz Magnussen to die at the teeth of the undead wolfpack that was encircling them. Her mind was still tumbling around from the crack on the head she’d received. Magnussen, oblivious to the approaching danger, continued to curse out loud. She put two shots from her Luger into one of the sluggish undead by the MRAP that Danny’s grenade hadn’t blown apart. The others were motionless, or struggling with shattered limbs, unable to attack. Danny croaked, then tried again; it sounded more like the zombie moan than anything else. She tried to wave her hands. One of them lifted up a few inches, then fell back. She turned her protesting neck to follow how far the hunter zeros had gotten in their careful stalking of their live prey.

There was one eight feet away from Danny.

It was so close, she could hear the rustle of its scabby tongue behind yellow teeth. The thing was looking directly at her with frost-dimmed eyes. When it saw her, it froze in position, knees bent, one leg forward, both arms held crookedly out before it with fingers extended. It stood like that, motionless, for several seconds.

Then it scented the air like an animal, hooking its shrunken nose into the dawn breeze.
It smells me
, Danny thought. She was helpless. It had her.

The zero moved, but not toward Danny. It hunched down low and slunk away to the next position of concealment, behind a dusty hatchback. Danny’s heart flooded with emotion.

It saw her and didn’t want to eat her.

It smelled her and moved on.

She could hardly move, and her throat would not speak. An evil thought came to her: If the thing didn’t attack, she must
already be
one of them.

Yet she felt pain, not hunger.

She felt fear for the living woman who was now up the ladder of the MRAP, shouting her disgust at the stench inside the cab.

Get in and shut the door, you stupid bitch!
Danny screamed inside herself. She tried to make the words come out but her vocal cords were unstrung and she could only gasp, sucking in a throatful of putrid gas.

Then Danny understood why she herself was still alive: She was soaked in the sludge of the far-rotten soldier’s corpse. She stank so powerfully it would make a graveyard rat puke. On her, the zombie couldn’t smell the living breath, the warmth of her blood. It could only smell its own, decaying kind.

Danny bent her eyes toward the Cougar MRAP.

Magnussen didn’t get into the cab, having discovered the same unbearable filth that had knocked Danny back. Instead she waved her hands around to clear the flies from her face and started searching the pavement for something. Maybe a rag to wipe up the rotten guts on the front seat.

She kept an eye on the nearest of the shuffling, slow zeros that were making their way toward her, but Danny had cleared a considerable radius with the explosion. Magnussen thought she had plenty of time.

What Magnussen was not anticipating (
because you wouldn’t fucking listen
, shouted the voice inside Danny’s head) was the stealthy approach of undead with fast reflexes, hunting instincts, and the ability to use concealment to get close to their prey.

Several others of the stalking pack had moved within twenty feet of the Cougar.

Magnussen had something less than fifteen seconds to get inside that vehicle and slam the door. If she did, she was safe as houses. She was surrounded by inch-thick steel plate, triple bulletproof glass, and a variety of armaments and survival gear.

Who gives a shit what it smells like, in the name of God
, Danny shouted, silently.
Get in
.

Danny tried again to wave her companion away, to get her attention, and this time she was able to lift both hands. Life was returning to her limbs. She wasn’t dead; her body was only rebooting. She still couldn’t speak.

Then she had an idea. Danny dragged her numb fingers around behind her belt, knuckles scraping on the pavement, and groped them across the tattered band of leather, looking for the satellite radio. It was gone. But there was a single pipe grenade left. She willed her fingers to close around it and they did, in the same slow, imprecise way as the artificial hands she’d seen at the veteran’s rehab center when she was learning to use her legs again.

She got the grenade clear of the belt and pulled her arm around by force of will until she could grasp the pipe with both hands. She probably couldn’t throw it far enough to avoid killing herself, but she didn’t particularly
relish surviving much longer, anyway. This was a better way to die. There were six or seven of the hunting zombies gathered behind vehicles all around Magnussen now, and Danny couldn’t figure out why her companion hadn’t seen them.

But she knew the answer already.
Because she doesn’t believe in them, of course
.

Danny turned her eyes to the grenade. She gathered her will, sending conscious commands to her arms. She pulled the fuse wire with all the force she could muster, and it didn’t move. She pulled again, and now that her arms were familiar with the orders they yanked apart and the wire came smartly out of the grenade. There was a little whiff of fuse smoke that nipped inside Danny’s nostrils, breaking through the stench of corpses. This was it. If things went the way she thought they might, she was about to be blown apart, either by dimes or ball bearings. She preferred dimes, if given a choice. Classier.

She turned her body like a rusty spring and threw the grenade as hard as she could.

To Danny’s surprise, the missile sailed briskly into the air and clanked down among the cars, not far from a pair of the crouching zeros. Magnussen heard the noise, and turned, pistol raised, searching with her eyes. Danny tried once more to shout.

At last, Magnussen saw the zombies. They broke cover at the same moment, oblivious to the importance of the grenade, but recognizing their quarry was alerted to them.

Silent as lions they came on, jaws open.

Magnussen fired three shots in rapid succession, pivoting her arm straight out in front of her to sweep the pack as it charged. One of the things went heavily down, then the rest were upon her.

She screamed, a low, angry cry, that honeyed singer’s voice lending melody even to this. The zeros slammed her against the hull of the MRAP.

Danny couldn’t see clearly—Magnussen was obscured between the fenders of the vehicle. Danny saw the monsters grabbing her arms, biting, trying to tear through the leather.

How long had it been since she threw the grenade? Five seconds? Six? It seemed as if ten minutes had passed since the fuse had flared to life.

Magnussen had one arm free of her tormentors and was shouting, swinging a brain pick side-to-side. She nailed one of the things, caught it in the head and it fell, its legs kicking as if electrified. But now Magnussen’s
hands were empty. Another of the undead lunged in, teeth flashing, and she was shoved back completely out of sight and her hoarse shouts turned to a high, gurgling whistle. Danny was too far away to tell if it was human blood or zombie ink, but something squirted through the air.