Rise Again (50 page)

Amy could hear metallic hammering noises, and assumed that was Danny getting blown to pieces. Amy was so used to Danny turning back up again—from that motorcycle accident when she was young, then from the war, and the war again, and another war, and now, coming back from her mission in the world of the undead—that she didn’t experience shock or grief, but disbelief. This couldn’t be it.

Danny couldn’t finally be gone.

Then it looked as if Amy’s faith was vindicated. Danny took the Mustang off-road, so much dust kicked up you couldn’t even see where it was. It was like a smokescreen, and the gun was shooting up all over the place but they could still hear the Mustang’s engine roaring away out there like a wounded bear. Danny was so smart, especially if everything was going wrong—she wasn’t so good in a noncrisis but this was right up her alley.

The shooting stopped. Where they going to let Danny go?
Please let it stop
, Amy thought.
You have no idea what she’s been through
. Then there was a
ching-thud, ching-thud
sound, two bursts of ten repetitions each, and a long moment later the desert blew up. They were shooting
bombs
at Danny. There was an explosion, and Amy saw the shape of the Mustang flip end-over-end, silhouetted against the halo of fire, and then it dropped into the flames and smoke and dirt and that was that.

Reese kicked Amy one more time, spat on her, and walked away, whooping with triumph. Murdo himself was hollering victory, clapping. Boudreau stood there watching the fires out in the desert, framed squarely in the gateway to the airfield. His posture was one of satisfaction, like a weary man admiring the snug house he had just finished building. Amy felt real hatred for these men. Hate and rage weren’t things she understood, but they had roosted inside her and she was going to have to deal with them. They wanted her to hurt and kill, to get revenge. That’s all the world had in it. Amy rejected these things, but the feeling, the black rage, burned on, like the fires in the desert that marked Danny’s grave.

Murdo clapped Boudreau on the shoulder as he walked toward the ASV. Boudreau rocked his fist in the air. They were yelling many things to each other. Apparently, they were the winners.

Then Boudreau’s ear blew off and he lurched backward and fell to the ground, dead, his skull emptied out by a high-velocity round. A second later they heard the gunshot. Murdo threw himself into the dirt, covered in blood and brains, and crawled under the ASV. Two more shots snapped through the night, but nobody else was hit. Reese sprinted inside the terminal building. The gates were still wide open, and now above the whoosh and crackle of the flames out in the desert they could hear the moaning. Undead were coming. Zeros.

Amy didn’t feel as good as she usually did. She had never been physically beaten before, beyond the occasional parental spanking. It wasn’t the pain so much as the fear it wouldn’t stop.

Reese had clearly gone easy on her. He couldn’t incapacitate the
medic, veterinarian or not: He was only trying to slow her down. Which had the opposite effect, of course. If he couldn’t afford to kill her, she could afford to give him the bird. Still, she was very sore. She felt a fresh wave of empathy for Patrick and didn’t blame him for having a nice, quiet coma.

Amy got creaking to her feet and hobbled across the parking lot. She could hear Murdo down low, arguing with the men huddled inside the ASV as she limped past. She could hear agitated voices inside the White Whale. She skirted around Boudreau’s corpse to the gates, and swung them shut, one at a time. She closed the padlock. One thing she wasn’t concerned with was getting shot by whoever was out there in the night—she had a feeling it was somebody she knew.

She could see the zeros coming, now: some as rough outlines crossing in front of the firelight, some moving into the glow of the headlights on the vehicles. They were slow and shuffling and slack-jawed, that sound like the wind in winter trees coming out of their throats. The undead were finally here. And it seemed to Amy there were an awful lot of them.

Dawn took its time coming. The Hawkstone men were no longer in control. They used the civilians as a human shield to extricate themselves from their vehicles; that was Molini’s idea. He suspected whoever shot Boudreau must be one of the men they’d ejected from the airfield, days before. Gun in hand, he formed up a weeping ring of survivors and sent them scuffling across the parking lot with himself in the middle. They pulled up next to each of the military vehicles, until all his comrades had been able to climb out and crouch behind the circle of human cover. They didn’t know from what direction the gunshots came, although it seemed likely to be along the road. Not worth taking chances. They forced the huddle of civilians back into the terminal, and then made them close all the roller blinds on the windows, while the mercenaries remained firmly on the floor, shoving their guns around. Becky with the fake boobs had the baby in her arms again. She pulled down a roller blind in the men’s dormitory. Flamingo was pressed against the wall with his gun aimed at her head. Patrick lay still between them.

“Goddamn coward,” she said.

“Fuck you, whore,” Flamingo said.

“This baby’s mother had more balls than you.” She strode past him, ignoring the gun.

The sky grew light that morning in a silvery overcast, the bank of clouds that had been on the horizon the previous day having moved in over the desert. It was hot and still. The overcast did nothing to cut the heat of the sun. All it did was dim the colors of the world, making the undead, with their leathery-gray skin and ragged, dingy clothes, look even more monochromatic. The trip through the desert had dried them out. Lips were pulled away from long teeth, eyes shrunken, bone structure telegraphing through the thin flesh. The fat ones in life had become as dry-skinned as all the rest, but the fat formed liquefying sacks around their waists, their thighs, and the upper parts of their arms. These dangled and swung like the infected udders of cows, leaking serum. The weight of this putrefying flesh dragged the loose skin in folds from their necks, their heads, giving them something of the look of droop-eyed hounds, their mouths pulled down in a caricature of a frown. The ones that had been slender in life were now angular stick insects, skeletons bound in hide, moving with difficulty as their tendons shrank and stiffened.

Around six-thirty, once the light was full, a bulky figure in the Hawkstone camouflage stepped out of the terminal. He looked around, his body poised for flight. Then he walked toward the corpse of Boudreau, unwilling, his steps as halting as if he were crossing a minefield. He made it to the body. The moaning of the undead went up loud and urgent. They could smell him. They wanted him. The chain link of the fence and gates bellied outward with the mass of the things. They wrung the wire with their fingers, clawing to get in.

The man took hold of the corpse’s sleeve and started pulling it across the parking lot. The corpse was heavy, heavier than the man dragging it toward the terminal building. He stopped halfway across to wipe the sweat off his face with his sleeve, taking the opportunity to scan his surroundings. Then he turned back to the task. He got the body another yard toward the terminal before a spray of blood leaped out of his chest and he fell across the corpse, his boots clawing at the pavement until he bled to death and went limp. The report of the rifle followed the impact by almost a second.

•

Inside the terminal, Murdo cursed and punched the wall, leaving a row of dimples where his knuckles hit the plasterboard. For a while it looked like Juan, the fat Mexican, was going to make it. They had dressed him up in Jones’s uniform, which didn’t fit him very well but looked convincing enough from the kind of distance a sniper would be dealing with. Then they forced the blubbering, shiny-faced man out the door at gunpoint: He could go out there where it was a fifty-fifty chance he’d get shot, or he could stay in here where the chance was one hundred percent. All the way to Boudreau’s body, Juan looked like he was still deciding which option suited him best. Then he seemed to gather courage. He was still alive, after all. Murdo thought the solid mass of zombies might be spoiling the shot for whoever was out there. It might have been true. But the sniper found a better angle, apparently, because he blew Juan’s heart clean out of his body.

Now the zeros were going crazy, their hunger driving them against the fence, as if they could push themselves clear through it if they tried hard enough. Murdo’s main concern was that they probably could. There were hundreds of them, with more on the way, and the fence rocked slightly as they thrust themselves upon it.

Meanwhile, inside the terminal, the civilian hostages wept and cursed.

Wulf got another one with a trick shot. He’d spent the morning of the third day after he rescued the sheriff getting himself into the high ground overlooking the airfield, and he was working his way along the ridge. These Hawkstone dipshits couldn’t simultaneously search for his position and hide on the floor, so they had no idea where to find him, and they obviously didn’t put on their thinking caps, either. Because right now there were very few safe places he could shoot from without getting eaten alive.

One of them was the stony ridge that ran parallel with the runway. He had a good six hundred feet of altitude at a fairly steep angle. From that height he could see down into the rooms of the terminal building, if the windows were clear. They had the place buttoned up pretty well now; all the blinds were drawn. But the blinds stood off the interior window frames
a couple of inches. He noticed, in one of the upstairs sleeping rooms the men used, every now and then somebody would move the edge of the roller shade a little and have a quick look around. And when they did, Wulf could clearly see the silhouette of legs, a glimpse of them, between window frame and blind. Invisible from below. Obvious from above.

Now, Wulf didn’t want to kill any noncombatants. He wasn’t sure about the fat guy he’d shot, for example. He wasn’t built like a fighter, and his uniform looked borrowed. So that might mean they were dressing up civilians and sending them out to die. Far from troubling Wulf, this merely added to the interest of the assignment. The possibility of an unforgivable error made the stakes higher. Sweetened the pot. Still, he had to make damn sure it wasn’t a harmless woman, especially the one with the ten-gallon hats in her shirt. He thought he might have a chance with her, if he cleaned up a little.

He elevated the barrel of the rifle, adjusted for windage and gravity. The legs were there behind the window blind, and then the weight shifted and the curtain fell back into its usual position. They were about to move on.

Wulf fired, brought the target back into the scope, and waited.

There was no sign of whether he’d gotten a clean hit or not. There was a tiny black dot where the bullet had gone through the blind, half an inch from the window frame. A little haze around it. That would be the broken glass. Nothing else.

Wulf crawled backward on his belly until he was out of view. He didn’t want to risk their locating him: That grenade launcher could turn the ridgeline into Mount Rushmore. He scrambled along a deep ledge until he found the notch that took him right over the other side of the ridge.

It was getting harder and harder to travel, what with all the zombies down there. Looked like a wildebeest herd, but it was all walking corpses. Some of them were struggling along trails that a mountain goat would have trouble with. Wulf had seen a couple fall, tumbling down the mountainside to land broken in the rocks. One of them even kept on crawling. They weren’t afraid of anything, that was clear. Wulf was only afraid of them, nothing else (except maybe that Sheriff Adelman), so he figured that was about as good as it was going to get. All he had to do was stay up high and not fall off anything and break his back. The irony alone would kill him. And then he might get up dead and start looking for fresh meat.

Nothing else happened that day. Wulf was a man of infinite patience.

He waited.

Dawn came. Morning turned to day. Then the front door of the terminal building opened, and Wulf sighted on the figure below through the scope of his rifle. The man was wearing the Hawkstone camouflage.

The hunt was back on.

Danny opened her eyes.

The sun was shining. The sky was blue.

In the dream, she had been swimming. The water was warm and full of bright flashing fish. She dove down among the rocks and coral. There was no question of drowning. She could hold her breath forever. She swam down through a gap in the rocks, where the light was green and dim. Then she swam through a dark tunnel, ribbed and barreled like the inside of a cartoon whale. She swam upward toward the light, broke the surface, and found herself in a bathtub. It was in an all-white bathroom with a bedroom beyond. A fire burned in the fireplace.

Then she woke up.

“You look like Patrick,” she murmured.

“I am Patrick,” the man replied. This surprised Danny. The Patrick she remembered was on the pretty side of handsome. This man was not. His face was a symphony of yellows and browns, with notes of deep blue like the USDA ink stains on a side of beef. His nose was very different from Patrick’s as well, all dented in, and one of his eyes was a raw, red slit between thick lids.

Only his hair looked the same.

“Hi,” Danny said, and laughed a little. Laughing was physically painful, but it felt good anyway. It sounded like rocks grinding together. Of events at Boscombe Field, Danny had no recollection at all. She dimly remembered driving down the road, but nothing more.

“Take it easy,” Patrick said. “We got you stuffed with all kinds of painkillers. Might make you kind of light-headed.”

“Who’s we?” Danny asked. She was floating in a haze, unable to connect even the most rudimentary pieces of information with each other.

The sun was behind Patrick’s head, turning his blond hair into a golden halo. He was wearing a white T-shirt. It occurred to Danny that she might be dead, and this was heaven. Then she was disappointed to remember what she had been avoiding the memory of since she awoke: The world was overrun by walking dead that ate human flesh. So probably this wasn’t heaven. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned it to Patrick.