Gimme Skelter: A Daria Fanfic

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Synopsis

In another time and place, college freshman Helen Barksdale and Jake Morgendorffer help make a young man’s dream come true. Unfortunately, the young man is a psychotic cult leader named Charles Manson. The dream that comes true is the apocalyptic nightmare of Helter Skelter.

Author's Notes

A lot of people have heard of Charles Manson. Not many people know what it was he was attempting to start when he ordered members of his commune "family" to commit a series of mass murders in southern California in August 1969. Manson was an ex-convict who had a demented vision he called Helter Skelter, after a song by the Beatles. Helter Skelter was his plan to start a race war that would destroy all civilization and leave the Manson Family as Earth's inheritors, with all surviving black people as their slaves. Details of Helter Skelter are given online at Wikipedia, CharlieManson.com (including a reprinted story from Esquire magazine), and in the closing argument delivered by the prosecuting attorney, Vincent Bugliosi, at Charles Manson’s trial in 1971. Quotes used in this story by Charles Manson and other members of the Manson Family are real and taken from numerous sources identified at the story's end.

Chapter titles are taken from the modified lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” by way of Rage Against the Machine. The font used is called (no kidding) Horrendous. I love it. The Rolling Stones' song on which this story's title is based, "Gimme Shelter," was never released in this alternate universe, as it originally came out in December 1969.

Highland, Daria Morgendorffer’s former home town, is here assumed to be in west Texas, per comments made by Mike Judge about the location of the Beavis and Butt-head series. Henry O. Flipper was the first black cadet to graduate from West Point; he served in Texas while in the U.S. Army. The “old Roman spearhead” is... not hard to figure out.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes out to my outstanding co-author/brain-trust Brother Grimace, who gave so many excellent suggestions and so much beta-reading assistance—and was kind enough to let me borrow Kyle Armalin for this little excursion to boot. You are so evil.

Thank you too to smk who was right about the commas darn it. And to Dennis, who caught the embarrassing Babe Ruth-Willie Mays switch. (I spent so much time researching that, too.) And to Richard Lobinske, for clarifying the toxic waste/dioxin thing. And to Vlademir1, Disco316, Brandon League, and smk (again & again!) for finding other errerrs. You rock.

—Vincent Bugliosi, attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson for the Tate-LaBianca Murders (1975, interview)

“Helen and Jake,” said the bearded madman, “when you left Middleton College and came to our commune, you gave up being slaves of the Machine. You gave up your old families, forsook the Establishment, and became the children of a new family.”

The madman lifted his chin. His black eyes gleamed. “You are a part of my family now, The Family, the one and only. Together we will bring about Helter Skelter, as it was foretold by the Beatles in their White Album and in the Book of Revelation, Chapter Nine. ‘And he opened the bottomless pit.... and there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’

“So will we, the locusts, arise from the Bottomless Pit in Death Valley after Helter Skelter, after the black man has slain the last white man on the Day of Judgment, and The Family will rule the earth forever and ever to the end of time.”

The madman lowered his arms. “You know my true name, Helen and Jake. You know what it is that I ask of you, what we all ask of you. Help us to bring about Helter Skelter. Will you do this in my name, Helen and Jake? Tell me the answer. Tell me now.”

The naked couple bowed their heads before the bearded madman, their thoughts addled by drugs and their bodies exhausted from days of mindless orgies. “Yes,” they whispered, “we will do as you ask.”

“Jake,” said the madman, “you must take a new name. You will take the name of your father, Mad Dog, and cleanse it. You will be a new Mad Dog, more terrible than the one before you. You and Tex will be my generals, my advisers, my left and right arms. Through your deeds will the apocalypse come about. Say your name.”

“Mad Dog,” gasped the naked man. He wept with his eyes squeezed shut. “I am your Mad Dog.”

The madman turned his head. “You, Helen, will join the women. You will be lower than the dogs who eat before you do. You will do anything I ask, anything Tex or Mad Dog asks of you, anything. As Tex and Mad Dog are my arms, you and the other women are my fingers. Through your hands will blood flow like endless rivers. The music is telling the youth to rise up against the Establishment. Follow the music. Do whatever you are told, and Helter Skelter will come. You and the other women will be my fingers, my soldiers, my bed, my angels. Will you do this, Helen?”

The naked woman thought of the others: Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, Lynette Fromme, and the rest. She would be one of his angels, he had said. She, Helen Barksdale, would be one of Charlie’s Angels. That’s so beautiful, she dazedly thought. So beautiful.

The madman grinned. “The world will burn,” he said, “and we alone will survive. Let it begin tonight.”

“Let it begin,” repeated one of the other women. The chant grew and became a shout. “Let it begin! Let it begin!”

Helen swayed on her feet, shouting with the rest. The madman was holding something aloft in his left hand. It was the old Roman spearhead that Jake—no, that Mad Dog had found in his father’s belongings, the old Roman spearhead that the first Mad Dog had brought back from his days in the army, serving in postwar Germany. The first Mad Dog had never said where he had gotten the relic, but he bragged that whoever owned it would rule the world. Jake, the new Mad Dog, had stolen the spearhead when he left home for college a few weeks earlier. It was his revenge for all the terrible things the first Mad Dog had done to him as a child.

Let it begin, thought Helen as she shouted. She did not know anymore what it was she was shouting. It did not matter. Nothing did. It was Helter Skelter. She screamed until she was hoarse, screamed until darkness was all she saw around her.

Camp Henry O. Flipper
Highland, Lubbock District, Western Territories
Free Christian Republic of Texas
Sunday evening, August 29, 1999

He regretted that he could not pause to admire an admittedly legendary Texas sunset, the western sky aflame with red and orange up to the zenith, but he dared not slow his pace. 1st Lt. Michael James Mackenzie strode down a shattered and overgrown sidewalk toward the old high school building that served as the local Army of Texas HQ, grinding his teeth in frustration. He was late, coming in right at sundown (which made it worse), and he would surely catch hell for it from the Old Man even if it wasn’t his fault. That was how the military worked, after all. Behind him the supply convoy with which he had hitched from Fort Worth was refueling and undergoing maintenance, the drivers and gunners raising hell in the bars before stumbling late to their beds. Someone had a radio turned up with swing jazz from Fortress Detroit. A church tent was cooking up barbecue for the congregants. Mackenzie swallowed his hunger and kept moving, grateful that today had been relatively breezy for Texas in the dead of summer. His fatigues were sweat-soaked nonetheless.

Gasoline was rationed even to the military in the Western Territories, which kept road traffic to a minimum. It wasn’t like back home in Houston, where oil and gas were relatively cheap and almost every family had at least one car or truck. Mackenzie made it to the high school without seeing a single motorized vehicle, not even an MP patrol. Church bells began ringing as he hurried up the steps of the former school (Highland High, he noticed). He snapped off salutes to the guards outside and entered, taking off his duckbill cap. Behind him a bugle on loudspeakers began to play retreat. The closing door cut off the sound.

Mackenzie kept up his rapid pace indoors. It was the Old Man he was going to see, after all. He was not surprised to note oil lanterns sitting on shelves and tables all the way down the dark hall. Electric power was rarely seen this far west. Only hospitals, communication centers, and the like had generators. The sound of swing jazz guided his steps to a bored private at a desk, listening to music as he wrote a letter. The private turned down the volume on his hand-cranked radio, stood and saluted, then pointed to a stairwell without bothering to check Mackenzie’s papers. “Third floor, first door on the left, knock first,” said the private, adding “sir” only after Mackenzie stared at him and waited.

It was tempting to dress the man down, but time was too short. Mackenzie fumed as he climbed the stairs, but he eventually discarded any desire for summary punishment to clear his head for the upcoming meeting. The dark third floor appeared to be deserted except for a lit oil lamp on a desk outside of an old classroom, the first door on the left. Mackenzie stopped at the closed door, drew himself up and straightened his fatigues—still a little starch left and presentable, though he wished he’d had time to shower and change into his pressed fatigues. Then he knocked on the door and waited.

Swallowing, Mackenzie opened the door and went inside. The room had several oil lamps scattered about, giving a good if dim view. His first startled thought was that he had not seen so many books in one place in all his life. Books of every size and shape and color were shelved and stacked around the walls, neatly ordered and packed together tighter than bus riders on a Saturday. Mackenzie had not seen such a thing outside of the libraries he had frequented in Houston as a boy. Had the Old Man read all of them? It did not seem possible. It made him deeply envious.

The other thing that crossed his attention was the sword on the Old Man’s desk. It was a real honest-to-God U.S. Marines Mameluke sword with a gleaming gold hilt and silver blade. It had been polished to mirror brilliance. It appeared to have a significant edge, too. Mackenzie wondered if the Old Man knew how to use it.

Across the room, a bald, broad-shouldered man in worn fatigues stood by an old teacher’s desk, looking out at the twilight through the rows of open windows. His thick hands were clasped behind his back. The Old Man, it could be no one else. General Kyle Armalin, the living legend. Mackenzie came to attention just past the door and saluted. “Lieutenant Michael Ja—” he began.

“At ease, and shut the door,” interrupted the older man without turning around. He continued to look out the windows as Mackenzie closed the door and waited. A cool wind came in and made the lamps flicker. Outside, sentries sounded off in rapid order, preparing the night’s defenses. A snare drum rolled, one verse from the Free Texas Anthem was sung, then more orderly shouts rang out. One voice then rose above the rest: “Lock and load!” The cry was repeated many times.

Mackenzie began to wonder if he had been forgotten. At least the Old Man wasn’t angry with him for being late. He fidgeted, glancing around the room once more at the books. Maps were scattered about too, he noticed. He leaned down to make out the closest one.

“Have a seat,” said the Old Man. His voice rolled like distant thunder. He turned about, thumbed through the papers on his desk, then glanced up. “What do you drink?”

The question took Mackenzie aback. “Uh, just water, if you have it, sir. That’s all. Um, sorry I was late.”

The Old Man grunted and gestured to a cabinet in which books shared space with liquor bottles and small drinking glasses. “Bottle of it over there, the blue one. I don’t think it’s fresh, but—” He shrugged and pulled open a desk drawer, took out a shot glass and a half-empty bottle of gold liquor, and set them on his desk.

Mackenzie found the water among numerous bottles of well-sampled West Indies rum, then hesitantly picked up a nearby glass that did not look too dirty. The Old Man took a seat behind his desk and poured himself a straight shot. Mackenzie noticed it was fine dark Jamaican rum, Appleton brand. The Old Man didn’t believe in half-stepping. Mackenzie didn’t begrudge the general his poison. He was thirsty as a horse and the water was fine.

The Old Man tossed back his drink, then settled back in his chair and regarded Mackenzie with his fingers laced over his flat abdomen. The gold star and gold cross on his fatigue lapels glittered in the lamplight, as did the differently crafted gold stars on his shoulders. “How was it on the way in?” he asked.

“Not too bad, sir.” Mackenzie thought back. “Few small mobs. Didn’t slow us down. Had a truck breakdown, though, which made us late.” He cleared his throat. “What’s it been like out here, sir?”

“Varies. Most nights, nothing much. We do a lot of sweeps in daytime out to ten miles. They’re good at tunneling and hiding, even on flat ground, and they’re getting better, harder to catch ‘em.”

Mackenzie nodded and studied his empty glass. “I’ve heard it’s still pretty bad out north and east, sir. They might still be finding ways across—um, the Mississippi.” Mackenzie felt his face heat up from embarrassment. “Sorry, sir, you probably already know that.”

The Old Man’s expression did not change. “Hmm. We’ve blown up every bridge we can find, except the one to Shreveport, but they can’t cross that. I doubt they’re using boats. They still can’t swim, and about all the old boats are rotted away or sunk. Maybe they’re using logs, but it doesn’t seem likely. Maybe they go north to old Canada and come down that way. Who knows.”

“Not many.” The Old Man leaned forward and poured himself another shot. “Not to change the subject, but are you a follower of Brother Malcolm, lieutenant? Prophet Malcolm, I mean? No disrespect intended.”

Mackenzie shot the Old Man a wide-eyed look of shock. “Uh—no, no, I’m not, I—oh, you mean me not drinking, sir. No, I just—don’t like to drink on duty. I mean, I don’t drink on duty.” Horror then struck him when he realized that the Old Man was drinking and might be offended by the remark.

Instead, the Old Man seemed amused. “It’s after sundown,” he said. “I consider myself to be off duty at the moment.”

“No, just . . . curious, that’s all. Don’t worry about it, I could care less.” The Old Man settled back again and looked at Mackenzie reflectively.

Mackenzie tried to think of something to say. What the hell was going on? Why had he gotten out of school with honors, only to be sent to a wasteland post like Flipper? Was the Army punishing him for thinking he wasn’t a good enough Christian, had he pissed off someone important, or what?

“In case you’re wondering why you’re here,” the Old Man began, oblivious to Mackenzie’s dumbstruck expression, “I’m getting to that point in my own good time. Your name came up as a person of interest because of your honors at Buxton Ridge. You were valedictorian and graduated a year early, correct? You’re eighteen?”

Mackenzie nodded. His performance at military school had brought his early promotion on graduation. He was said to be the smartest guy in his graduating class. He was completely at a loss as to where this conversation was going, however.

“Expert marksman, High School Olympics athlete, scholar . . . got a girlfriend or wife? Kids? Any close family?”

Mackenzie swallowed and studied the floor. “No girlfriend or kids, sir. We sort of—my girlfriend and I broke up when I left school. We were going different ways and—”

The Old Man’s bluntness made Mackenzie laugh despite his great discomfort. “Uh, yeah, she did, but whatever, I don’t care about that, sir, that’s all past. My family’s just my dad, back in Houston. My mom—” Mackenzie’s smile was gone “—she died—she was killed when I was three, in a big raid on Birmingham. I don’t remember much of it. My dad moved with me here right after that. He never remarried.”

The smile returned to Mackenzie’s face. “Yes sir, I do. I’ve got to admit—” He looked around “—seeing your library here really knocked me out. You’ve got a great set-up. Kind of makes me jealous, sir.”

The Old Man nodded and sat in silence, looking at the books. He then leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him. His dark eyes bored into Mackenzie’s own. “Lieutenant,” he said, “are you scared of anything? Not just afraid, everyone’s afraid now and then, but have you ever been scared spitless, so scared you couldn’t move or think or pray to save yourself? That ever happen to you?”

The question left Mackenzie at a loss for words. What kind of crazy question was that? Was he serious?

“I’ll take that as a no,” said the Old Man in a satisfied tone. “Probably wouldn’t have gotten far at Buxton Ridge if you were. Did your school ever get attacked while you were there?”

“Yes, sir. Several times.” Mackenzie remembered it vividly: sirens at night waking him, alarm bells, shouting and running upstairs, searchlights, machine guns rattling—there they are! there! fire! fire fire fire!— tracer lights floating like fast streams of fireflies, the M-16 bucking in his hands and pounding his shoulder, shrill whining in his ears, aiming and shooting down target after target after target after target after—

“What caused it—the Moon Plague, the Zom. The End Times, when the Beast put its mark on everyone who wasn’t black and drove them mad. What do you think really caused that?”

“They say it started right after men got back from the Moon, the Apollo thing. Some people think they brought a virus or something back from the Moon with them. Some people don’t think anyone landed on the Moon. They say the Zom was God’s punishment against white people for their sins, but if that was so, why make the black man suffer, too? What do you think it was?”

“Do you believe,” continued the Old Man, warming to the subject, “that there was ever a time when people of any color other than brown or black did not act like wild, half-human devil beasts whose only goal in existence was to kill everything they could catch? Do you believe there was ever a zom, any kind of white person be it man or woman or child, who could read or write or talk normally or do anything other than run around naked and punch and bite at people?”

“Uh—well, certainly, sir. I mean, there are pictures of them doing stuff in books, doing things like you and I do, sir. I mean, sure, I never saw one who—”

“You don’t think those pictures were faked? Lot of young people nowadays think those people in the old books were actually black, disguised for some reason or wearing cosmetics, or maybe the cameras made them look white. They think the old people who remember white people being different are lying or covering up, making up tall tales, whatever. You believe any of that?”

“You were brought here,” the Old Man again interrupted, “because we’re putting together an overland expedition to head westward as far as we can possibly go. We need people who won’t flinch no matter what we find, and no one has any damn idea what we’ll find. No one. We’re going off the new maps and onto the old ones, which might not be worth a rat’s ass in hell. That’s why you were sent here. I put out the call, some desk jockey in Austin thought you might have it in you to make the trip, and bam, you’re here.”

“Oh,” said Mackenzie. He forgot everything else. “We’re going west? How far west?”

Stung, Mackenzie frowned and thought hard. “Okay, do we want to get through the Rocky Mountains, to the place called California beyond that? Is there something we’re looking for?”

“Mmm-hmm.” The Old Man nodded. “We are indeed looking for something, and if you utter a single word of what I’m going telling you, you will spend the rest of your life on cremation detail in this nowhere camp, burning every zom carcass we find or make out here. You follow me?”

The Old Man looked pleased. “Done.” He picked up a paper from his desktop and tossed it over to Mackenzie. It was a standard map of the Free Christian Republic of Texas. “Every single day and night for the past thirty years, we’ve fought for our very survival. Thousands, maybe millions of us perished, but not in vain. We’ve got a homeland now, a place worth living for. We just need to find a way to keep so many of us from dying for it. For thirty years we’ve wondered what happened to cause ninety percent of mankind to go insane and try to kill the rest of us off. We don’t have the answers, but we’re beating the odds anyway. We’ve finally got the upper hand here in Texas, but thousands of other people are still trapped in Detroit, Manhattan, D.C., and a dozen other fortified cities and enclaves across the eastern half of this continent. We’ve done everything we can to find a cure for the Zom, be it plague or curse, but nothing’s worked. A lot of preachers say that nothing will work, it’s all the doing of God or Satan or Allah or you name it, but I don’t buy that. I can’t buy it. If I did, there wouldn’t be any hope.”

He tapped the western edge of the map. “We’re leaving the known world, lieutenant. Short-wave operators picked up a signal from the west three weeks ago. It’s very faint, difficult to detect. Someone is broadcasting in Morse code, someone who isn’t accustomed to doing it but has pretty clearly heard our AM radio transmissions, all the way from out here. Whoever’s doing it is trying to communicate with us. Getting better at it too. Quick learner. She’s sending us information about what it’s like on the other side of the Rockies, in the southern part of old California. She’s asking for help in—”

“She. She says she’s a young woman living by herself, hiding out from zoms and other things. Could be anyone, but we’ll take her word on it for now. Not likely a joke, as her descriptions of the area match up with some old books.”

The stunned look on Mackenzie’s face made the Old Man smile. “We are indeed. She says she knows what caused the Zom. She can’t explain it, but she knows what’s doing it and where to go to stop it. So we’re going. We leave in two days. Glad you weren’t any later getting here than you were.”

Mackenzie realized he was still holding his empty water glass. He put it on the general’s desk. “How many people are going?”

“We can only afford to cut five trucks, one of ‘em a tanker. Whatever we can get on those will go.” The Old Man gave Mackenzie a significant look. “We’re on a mission like no other. You don’t breathe a word about it even to your father. It’s my solemn responsibility on top of that to tell you that we’re not likely to make it back, no matter what we try to do. There are a lot of old cities between here and California, probably full of zoms and nothing else. The maps might not be worth anything, either—roads washed out, bridges down, Christ only knows. Can’t afford to risk a plane for aerial support, don’t have enough of them in working order. We’re going anyway.”

The Old Man’s grin lit up his face. “Hell, I wouldn’t miss this for anything. Being a general is the worst thing on earth, sit on your ass and twiddle your thumbs and sign papers all goddamn day. God, I wish I was a colonel again sometimes.”

“Not yet. We’re just listening right now, recording everything.” The Old Man settled back in his chair with another shot glass of golden rum. “That’s enough for now. Forget you heard any of this, go get some rest, and report back to me at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow. I’m putting you in charge of one of the trucks. Anything happens to it, you and everyone on it walks home or dies out there. There’s no margin for error. Don’t let it happen.”

Wordless, Mackenzie got to his feet. He could barely believe any of this had occurred. He gave a slow salute.

The Old Man saluted back, then drank down the rum. Outside, soldiers began shouting. Red flares roared into the night sky. Machine guns rattled and mortars thumped. Warning klaxons howled. The Old Man sat back and paid no attention to it whatsoever.

Mackenzie had reached the door when a deep voice called after him. “By the way, lieutenant.”

“The girl sending messages to us,” said the Old Man. He reached for the rum bottle. “She says she’s white.”

Camp Henry O. Flipper
Highland, Lubbock District, Western Territories
Free Christian Republic of Texas
Monday morning, August 30, 1999

Despite General Armalin’s insistence upon secrecy, it became apparent to Mackenzie the following morning that everyone in the town, literally everyone, knew something was up. Soldiers and civilian contractors alike peeked at him as he ate breakfast in the camp mess hall, a reaction that he initially put down to his being new in the area. He was disabused of this notion the moment he left the mess and began walking toward headquarters. A group of middle-aged women in church dresses on the sidewalk began singing a stanza from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as he approached, then shouted “Bless you on your journey, sir!” when they finished. Several reached out to touch him as he passed.

“Here,” said a weather-beaten old man not thirty seconds later. He came down from his front porch and held out a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun and a bag of shells. “Take her, boy. She got me out of Memphis. You take her now. Go with God, and good luck.” Stunned, Mackenzie took the weapon and ammo, thinking to look them over before handing them back—but the old man clapped a hand on his shoulder, gave him a trembling smile, then walked back inside the house and closed the door.

By the time he got to the old high school, Mackenzie had also been given two bags of food, a new canteen, an old paperback travel guide to Arizona, two combat knives, and a newly sharpened machete. The urgency with which his benefactors gave over their treasures kept him from refusing them. It seemed terribly important to each and every person that he accept their gifts, no matter what he thought or what the gifts were. The sentries at the doors of the school smirked when they saw him, but said nothing when they saluted. Mackenzie could not return the salute as his hands were full.

“Christ on a Christmas tree, what do you think this is, your goddamn birthday?” snarled the Old Man two minutes later. “You got a cake in there, too? Put that goddamn crap down and get your ass out to the motor pool in back. You’ve got vehicle number one.”

Chastened and relieved of his gifts, Mackenzie appeared a few minutes later in the huge parking lot behind the school. Old military vehicles were lined up everywhere, all of them old and much renovated, but it was obvious that several were receiving extraordinary amounts of attention. One in particular caught his eye. He gravitated toward it, his mouth falling open.

The vehicle was a five-ton Army tractor with a roof-mounted .60-caliber machine gun, towing a vehicle-carrier trailer. On the trailer was what Mackenzie thought at first was a World War II-era Sherman tank, except that its turret was equipped with the widest, longest main gun he had ever seen in his life. The Sherman’s treads, fenders, drive wheels, idler and bogie wheels, and main engine had been removed, leaving only the hull below the turret to rest on a metal platform on the trailer. Numerous cables were attached to keep the tank held down to the trailer itself. Men with a mobile crane were preparing to lower a small generator into the compartment where the engine had been. Extra fuel tanks and pipes were stacked up to await their turn to be mounted, whether on the inside or outside Mackenzie could not tell. Two big machine guns pointing in opposite directions had been fixed to the cupola.

“Like it?” asked a captain with a grease-streaked face. He looked to be in his fifties, old for a low-level officer. He held out a cigarette as he nodded toward the tractor-trailer and tank. RHODES, read his sewn-on name tag.

“Oooh, yeah! Few of them babies were sittin’ ‘round Fort Hood doin’ nothin’, so we borrowed one.”

“Hell, you’d have to ask the Old Man, not me.” The captain pointed. “See where they mounted those long arms on the side of the trailer? They’ll swing ‘em out and brace the trailer on the ground so it won’t flip over when they fire that ninety milli-mother. That thing goes off, shit downrange is gonna evaporate.” He gave Mackenzie a look. “You assigned to a vehicle?”

The captain raised an eyebrow. “You got the hot seat,” he said, pointing to the left. “Last one down the row, and good luck.”

“You’re leadin’ the convoy.” The captain grinned. “Shit goes down, you’re the first one to fall in it.”

Lacking any sense of reassurance, Mackenzie walked slowly down the line of vehicles. The five-ton tractor and fuel tanker was no surprise. The tractor had the requisite .60-caliber machine gun on top. Next was another five-ton armed tractor with a flatbed cargo trailer, loaded with supply crates down the center. Along the sides of the flatbed were mounted things that looked like extra-long—

“They’re not Gatling guns,” said a woman’s voice. He turned. A young woman with her long hair in braided cornrows was walking toward him. She wore a white skirt and short-sleeved blouse, neither of them revealing as the skirt went below her knees and the blouse was buttoned up in front. A small gold cross on a necklace was visible at her throat. Over her left breast was a red patch with white lettering: LANDON ARMAMENTS.

Mackenzie gave her a long look before glancing back at the devices on the flatbed. “Well, pardon me, but they sure look like ‘em. Miniguns, then, like they had on helicopters in Vietnam?”

“C’mere,” said the young woman. She walked closer to one of the devices and pointed up at it. “Why is that not a Gatling gun?” she asked, turning to face him. She waited.

He studied the weapon, half thinking of the young woman at the same time. She was smooth, easy on the eyes. “I don’t see where the ammo feed is,” he said, then frowned and stepped closer. He almost forgot about the girl. “How do the barrels rotate? I don’t see anything that would make them—”

“The shells are already inside,” said the young woman. She reached up, indicating the long gunmetal barrels. “This is a Landon Lightning. Starting about two feet back from the muzzle, the whole chamber is filled with rocket-propelled armor-piercing shells. Each shell has its own fuel supply, ignited electrically in sequence by the operator. The barrels fire in sequence, not all at once, but they’re made of an alloy that allows the barrel to cool rapidly. Each shell has a skirt at the back to prevent premature ignition of the shells behind it. The standard Lightning has six barrels like this, but we can make them with any number of barrels. There’s no delay time from the moment the operator activates the system to the first volley. The system can be set to fire short bursts of a designated number, or longer bursts at the operator’s discretion. An expended mount can be sent back to the company for refurbishing and reloading at a reduced charge.”

Mackenzie looked the woman in the eye. He had met civilian arms manufacturers before. It was one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in Texas, next to arms dealing and oil drilling. “You work for the company that makes these,” he said.

They shook. She had a firm, no-nonsense grip. “Lieutenant Michael Mackenzie, Third Texas Infantry. I just got in yesterday.”

“My dad,” she said. “Always needs help to explain what he invented.” She looked him over with interest. “Pleasure meeting you, sir.”

“And you,” said Mackenzie. He momentarily forgot what he was going to do next, watching her walk away with those perfect hips swaying, so hypnotic—

Lead vehicle, lead vehicle. He went his way, passing a deuce-and-a-half with a machine gun over the cab and a canvas-covered cargo bay, then saw his vehicle. He stopped in astonishment, then walked closer and took a casual tour around it.

Where had the Army found this? No one appeared to be around until he spotted a disheveled corporal sitting in the shade against one of the vehicle’s enormous tires, a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette in hand. The man looked very young; he could have been a teenager. His shirt was undone and his cap was off, revealing a significant if badly kept Afro. He gave Mackenzie a weary glance before staring off into space again.

Mackenzie looked the vehicle over again. It looked like a miniature tank with no main gun, though a two-barreled weapon was mounted atop the small turret. It had six wheels, three per side, the whole thing measuring about sixteen feet long. A black Texas star had been freshly painted on the sand-colored turret.

“I have to confess,” Mackenzie said, “I’ve never seen one of these before.”

The corporal sniffed and took a drag on his toke, blowing out a thin stream of smoke.

The man’s insolence was starting to grate. Mackenzie wanted to stay cool as long as he could, but it wouldn’t take much to set things off now. “This one’s my vehicle,” he said. “Could you give me a quick tour of it, or find me someone who could? If it’s not taking too much time out of your day, that is.”

The corporal looked up with narrow eyes. He then got up from the ground with a sigh, put on his cap, and made a futile effort to tuck in his shirt tail.

“It’s a Saladin armored car, sir,” he began, gesturing with his cigarette. “It’s about forty years old, from someplace called England originally, wherever that is. The engine’s got spare parts from about everywhere, but it runs good, about one-eighty horsepower. We made up some of the parts on our own.” He began a slow walk around the vehicle, gesturing at different places. “We got two spare tires, but that’s all. It’ll run on four wheels if the middle ones are gone. We put a spare tank on the rear there with a grill over it for protection. That extends the range to about four-fifty, five hundred miles. It’ll do about forty on a paved road, so that sets the convoy speed. It buttons up so if we have to drive through a million or so zoms, we can do it long as we don’t run out of gas.”

“Yessir.” He pointed up at the turret. “This thing used to have a dummy gun on it, seven-six millimeter, but we took it off and put on those dual forty-millimeter automatic grenade launchers. That’s a starlight scope there for night fighting. We wanted something to take down a butt-load of zoms at once. Flamethrowers had too short a range, use up too much gasoline, not reliable enough. Then this company out of Austin started making these launchers with Willy-Pete grenades, so we got a few of them. I never—”

“White phosphorus, sir. It’s an incendiary. The old U.S. Army used to use it to make smoke, but they say it does a bitch of a job on zoms, burns ‘em right up. I haven’t fired it yet. I hope one of them doesn’t blow up on us. The grenade launchers are an old design, the company says, forty or fifty years old. They started making ‘em again with some changes, like a lever that pulls back both charging handles at once, adjustable trigger to fire one or both guns, and so on. Launchers are supposed to have a range of about a mile, give or take. Guess we’ll find out the truth of that. We’re the laboratory rats, in a way. Wouldn’t put it past them to do that.”

“That’s the one.” Freeman made a last gesture at the vehicle. “Crew was supposed to be three, but I think it’s just the two of us. They probably want it that way to keep casualties down in case we get to be zom food.”

The corporal dropped the joint butt and crushed it out. “Sorry if I’m not being respectful enough, sir, but I’ve been up all night working on the engine of this son of a bitch and just got done with it before you came up.”

“I appreciate the tour.” Mackenzie stuck out a hand. “Lieutenant Mackenzie.”

They shook. “Corporal Freeman, sir,” said the man. “This whole expedition is nothing more than a weapons test for Landon, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

Mackenzie knew he wasn’t supposed to say anything about going to rescue the girl in California, but it was tempting. “I’m sure there’s more to it,” he said.

“I’d like to think so, sir,” said Freeman, looking back down the row of vehicles, “but the Landons have this air about ‘em like they’re the ones going to Heaven when Jesus and the Millennium come, and we’re the ones who’ll have to clean up after.”

It was a discomforting thought. Jodie Landon did have a very reserved manner, but Mackenzie didn’t put it down to arrogance. It was just the lady’s way. “Is her father going along on this trip?” he asked.

“Both of ‘em are going,” said Freeman in disgust. “Just what we need, tourists.”

Mackenzie stared at the corporal in disbelief, then looked down the vehicle line. Jodie was talking to a group of officers, pointing at the weapons she had called Landon Lightnings.

He put his thoughts aside. “Do we have a checklist of everything we’re bringing with us?” he asked Freeman.

Freeman snorted and covered his mouth, trying not to laugh. “Clerks are still typing it up, sir,” he said. “They’re making it up as they go along. I kid you not.” The cynical smile on his face faded away. “There’s a lot about this little soiree that doesn’t add up.”

Freeman looked uncomfortable. “I should keep it to myself for now, if you don’t mind, sir.”

“Okay.” Mackenzie raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t like what’s going on, why not opt out and stay behind?”

Freeman’s sardonic grin returned. “Hell, no! I want out of this place! Nothing going on here at all, and I’m like to die of ennui. I mean, sir.”

“I can understand that.” Mackenzie looked up at the turret. “May as well check out the ride. How does a man get up there?”

The day went quickly. Mackenzie began making his own list of everything the Saladin carried. Most of its cargo by weight was belt-fed grenade ammunition, a third of which was white phosphorus and the rest high explosive. He recognized the grenade launcher design as a Mark 19, an old design indeed but with a few improvements. Jodie’s father certainly seemed to know what he was doing. Funny to think his daughter had to translate for him, but Mackenzie had met techno-nerds before and knew what they were like. That Urkel kid back at Buxton Ridge, he had to have been the worst. Mackenzie went over the Saladin again and again until he thought he could drive it himself if he had to. The steering wasn’t that different from most wheeled vehicles. He did wonder about the twin grenade launchers, but as Freeman pointed out, they would have to find out about them the hard way.

That evening one of the local churches threw a special big-tent supper for the soldiers of Camp Flipper. Few zoms were out, so gunfire did not spoil the festivities. Mackenzie thought it was strange, the mingling of military and civilian elements this far out in the wilderness, but it made a kind of sense even beyond the safety-in-numbers dictum. Wherever Army camps were set up, camp followers followed. Behind the camp followers came the black market dealers and arms salesmen, then missionary groups from the big-town churches to make sure the soldiers were right with God in these apocalyptic days, then more camp followers, then people would started getting married and having kids and living off-post in cleaned-up buildings that hadn’t yet fallen down, and before you knew it you had a living community where once you had only an abandoned ghost town with half its buildings collapsed. They were reclaiming the old world for the new. Mackenzie liked it, strange or not.

The church dinner grew boisterous as dance music was broadcast and townsfolk mingled with men in uniform. There seemed to be a lot of young women around, none of them particularly interesting to him. Mackenzie found himself occasionally presented with gifts by people he had never met, just as had happened earlier. He began to despair of having a normal conversation.

“It’s because you’re new,” said a voice at his elbow. He turned and saw Jodie beside him in a black evening gown, overdressed to an extreme though visually pleasurable degree. “Everyone else has already gotten something or come up with their own equipment. You were the last one to arrive. It makes you special.”

“I see.” Mackenzie looked at a compass with a polished gold case that a man had presented him with moments earlier. He stuck it in a trouser pocket and tried to think of a topic. “How did your father come up with the idea for those, um, Lightning guns?”

“He said he liked to play with fireworks when he was a kid,” she replied. “You’ll have to ask him the rest of the story.”

“‘He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword,’” Mackenzie quoted after a beat.

“Yeah, an old American one. ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ We used to sing it at school.”

“Hmmm.” Jodie took a drink from a tray offered by a churchwoman, then sipped it. “Apple cider,” she grumbled. “You’d think they’d splurge a little and have Champaign. Jesus drank wine, why can’t we?”

Of course she had someone else. It figured she would, someone like her. “He’s a lucky man,” he said.

“You’ll have to tell him you said that,” said Jodie. “Some days he isn’t so sure.”

That was an odd thing to say. He decided to change the subject. He didn’t want another romantic entanglement like the one back at Buxton Ridge with Jennifer. “Are you and your father going with us tomorrow?”

“We are indeed.” Her dark eyes twinkled. “Does that meet with your approval?”

“Not my place to say,” he said, forcing a smile. He couldn’t imagine why she would want to go into a wasteland where zoms lived in untold numbers, or why her father would let her. Or why General Armalin would let them, for that matter. “Let’s hope the trip is worth it,” he finished.

“It will be.” She said it in a predatory way that made Mackenzie believe she was not talking about rescuing the white girl in California. Mackenzie recalled Corporal Freeman’s suspicions that there was more to this expedition than was being discussed, even in secret. What was going on here?

“Excuse me,” Jodie said as she looked across the room. “I believe Dad needs me again. See you.”

“And you.” He watched her go, but even her tight black gown wasn’t enough to raise his spirits. Settling down did not seem like such a bad idea with someone like her. He had only gotten into the race too late.

Mackenzie circulated as best he could, trying to avoid anyone he thought was going to give him more gifts for the road. He had “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” running through his head now. One stanza kept repeating itself: As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free. He could not shake himself of it. The mind is a funny thing, he thought.

The Old Man was chatting with a group of much older men, both military and civilian. He had an empty shot glass in his hand, gesturing with it as he spoke. Wearing pressed fatigues with his shirt tucked in, Corporal Freeman leaned against a tent pole as he talked to a cute local girl in an animated way about Austin politics. Freeman was quite the political cynic, judging from his conversation. Mackenzie had the idea Freeman was trying to get into the girl’s pants and was about to succeed.

At nine-thirty the party began to thin out. When he heard the bugle on loudspeakers play “call to quarters” at ten, Mackenzie decided to turn in. The convoy would be on its way by sunrise and he needed his rest. He was on his way out of the tent when someone tapped him on the shoulder. The gentleman who caught his attention was a tall, thin man, bald and wearing glasses. His tuxedo, however, stood out more than anything else about him.

“Your pardon, sir,” said the gentleman, shaking Mackenzie’s hand. He had a peculiar accent. “On behalf of the Republic of Zimbabwe, please accept my best wishes for all you hope to accomplish in the days to come.”

“Thank you,” said Mackenzie. He wasn’t aware that anyone from the former Republic of South Africa was here. It was the only other nation of significance left on the Earth after the Zom. “Are you from there?”

“I am a diplomatic representative on tour,” said the man. “Abraheem Malebo. I am in awe of your accomplishments.”

“Your country’s. Yours are no doubt just as great, but to see the spirit in your countrymen, your fire to seize your future, it is very encouraging. I will let you go, you have doubtless much left to do. God be with you.” He shook hands with Mackenzie again and added, “Good luck at White Sands.”

“Uh, sure. Thanks.” Mackenzie was unable to keep the puzzlement out of his face. What was this about White Sands? He knew the old military facility was one of many on the way to California, but he had heard nothing about the convoy making a stop there. Perhaps the gentleman had heard wrong. Thinking it best to go before the conversation wandered further afield, Mackenzie left for the officers’ billets where he was staying.

General Armalin, holding his empty shot glass, stood outside the billets doors. He was gazing at something in the distance that Mackenzie could not see. “Good night, sir,” Mackenzie said with a salute as he headed inside.

The Old Man put out an arm to stop him before he reached the doors. The general did not appear drunk, but there was something odd about him that Mackenzie could not identify. The Old Man raised a finger, like a teacher making a point in class, and looked Mackenzie in the eyes.

“The original lyrics to that song,” said the Old Man, “were: ‘As He died to make men holy, let us die—” He drew out the word, then went on “—to make men free.” He lowered his hand. “Remember that, lieutenant.”

Mackenzie blinked, so shocked he was unable to speak. How in the hell had the Old Man known—

“Good night, lieutenant,” said the Old Man. He walked inside the billets and left Mackenzie by himself in the warm night air.

State Highway 380, just east of Roswell
Former state of New Mexico
Tuesday noon, August 31, 1999

After thirty years without visits from maintenance crews, the two-lane highway was not in good shape. Tall weeds overgrew the shoulders and sprang from a million cracks in the asphalt. Bushes and saplings growing up through the middle of the road were crushed under the Saladin’s thick tires, then pulverized by the heavy trucks coming after it. Overhanging tree branches were snapped off by convoy trucks. Rusted-through road signs were invisible in the dense growth lining the wide culverts to either side of the highway. Maintaining a convoy speed of even 30 miles an hour was a constant challenge. Through breaks in the tree line along the culverts, Lieutenant Mackenzie saw only miles and miles of scrubland and desert, occasionally relieved by the vine-covered ruins of homes, gas stations, and shopping centers. And a zom.

The convoy’s first encounter with a zom lasted less than two seconds. The zom—a woman, Mackenzie thought from his glimpse of it—came out of the tree line fifty feet ahead and ran at the Saladin. Freeman did not slow the vehicle down or try to avoid her. The impact was a wet thump that flung the rag-doll zom into the overgrown culvert on the right side. It happened so quickly there was no time to shoot or even call out. Several gunners on the following trucks peered after her, but did not fire. No one saw what became of her.

Unnerved by the encounter, Mackenzie unhooked a radio mike from where he stood up in the commander's hatch in the Saladin’s turret, cooled by the road wind snapping his uniform. He raised the mike to his mouth, one thumb hovering over the on button, but had no idea of who he was calling or what he meant to tell them. He grimaced and put the mike away. For a while earlier he had worn a pair of goggles on to protect his eyes from dust, but they limited his field of vision. After the hit-and-run he wanted to see everything he could. Paranoia was the key to safety.

He went back to studying the highway maps under the hazy summer sky. Being the commander of the lead vehicle meant he had to guide the convoy to California according to the chosen route, without mistake. They were supposed to be on Highway 380, but it was difficult to tell exactly where they were. The maps were not especially detailed. The gold-plated compass he had been given indicated they were still heading due west as they had since dawn. He figured they had crossed the old state line into New Mexico at least an hour ago. The first big town they would find would be Roswell, which Mackenzie wanted to avoid at all costs because of the number of zoms he feared might be in the area. The pre-Zom population of Roswell was guessed to lie between twenty and thirty thousand. Barring disaster, some of the zoms would still be there, mindlessly roaming about in their never-ending search for someone with dark skin to appear.

The zoms’ very existence defied science, logic, and reason. Zoms did not eat or excrete anything; neither did they breathe or reproduce. They appeared to age, though slowly. A ten-year-old zom in 1969 was now a teenager in size. A shot to the head would stop it, but so would a shot to the heart or any other vital organ that would incapacitate a normal human. Their injuries did not heal though their wounds ceased bleeding in moments. It was not uncommon to see old zoms missing arms, hands, or even feet, walking on leg stumps. Zoms did not use tools or weapons, but a berserk, all-out attack employing nothing more than yellowed teeth, bony fists, and clawlike fingernails was a terrifying thing—especially when there were hundreds of zoms and only one of you.

Several times over the years foolhardy individuals had tried to disguise themselves as zoms to see if they could “pass.” It had never worked. The consequences were too often fatal, and few bothered to try anymore. Zoms obviously had some means of knowing if another human was not one of them. Their detection system did not seem to be based on sight, smell, sound, or any other sense known. This verifiable observation gave rise to the Satan hypothesis, which suggested that zoms had supernatural guidance, perhaps even an intelligent supernatural master. (That zoms were supernatural in themselves was widely considered fact, not theory.) The Satan hypothesis could not be proven, but it could not be disproven, and the evidence tended to support it.

Mackenzie mulled over all this as he strained to find any landmark that would pinpoint their exact position on the maps. So much had changed in three decades. Everything outside of Texas had reverted to wilderness or worse. Crossroads were buried under dust, and buildings were rubble piles; little of the old world remained. The Saladin’s odometer gave a general idea of their location, once converted from kilometers to miles, but Mackenzie wanted more.

He caught a glimpse of a coyote or wolf on the far side of a culvert, silently watching the convoy with wide yellow eyes. It was comforting to know that canines were still around. Thinking predators appreciate thinking company.

Just as zoms could detect live, dark-skinned humans, canines could detect zoms without difficulty. In these latter days most families had at least one dog and often more, friendly to all living people but intolerant of zoms. The irony of this was not lost on older folks who still remembered white policemen using German shepherds to attack civil rights marchers. Training a dog to attack a zom was absurdly easy. Few doubted that dogs had helped turn the tide.

The coyote made Mackenzie think of Rascal. Rascal had been his dog. He had loved the lazy, overweight border collie with all his heart. Rascal had been his best childhood friend. Rascal died fighting zoms that had gotten into the Houston suburb where Mackenzie and his father had lived. He incapacitated four zoms and injured five others before they killed him. Mackenzie and his father buried Rascal by their front porch, where he had liked to beg for treats from amused neighbors. After Rascal, Mackenzie had never wanted another dog. Rascal had been dog enough.

Mackenzie shook himself into awareness, mortified, and rubbed his eyes. Daydreaming was dangerous to the whole convoy. He did not want to think any longer about Rascal or the thirteen-year-old boy who screamed his dog’s name from a second-floor window as he watched his only friend die. He did not want to think of anything but the task at hand, finding a recognizable landmark, but all the landmarks he needed most had been erased by time.

In mid-afternoon, the scrub abruptly changed to light woodland, primarily cottonwoods and large oak shrubs that often grew around old subdivisions. The terrain was still flat. Mackenzie saw a significant break in the tree line ahead. He crouched and shouted for Freeman to slow down, then he stood and got the mike. “Wolf One to Alpha Wolf.”

“Might have something here.” Still holding the mike, Mackenzie peered through the gap in the tree line as they approached and found himself looking up another old street. The stone foundation of a home was barely visible through the undergrowth on the corner. More foundations and what appeared to be pits (basements, he thought) came into view as the Saladin kept moving. No standing walls, no road signs. The Saladin slowed and Mackenzie braced himself as the vehicle rolled over a decayed log in the road. The log appeared to have been carbonized.

He lifted the binoculars hanging from his neck and looked through the trees. Black logs lay about here and there, feeding new growth. The stub of a lone brick chimney rose through the trees, covered with vines. The ruins of the houses here were not merely collapsed. They were entirely gone except for the stony parts closest to the ground.

“It’s a town,” he said into the mike. “There must have been a wildfire here ten, maybe twenty years ago.”

If there had been a widespread fire, would any zoms have survived? They avoided fire if possible, but did not flee from it. Mackenzie shouted to Freeman to keep going moving at twenty-five miles an hour. The old street soon became two lanes wider and easier to travel. Mackenzie recognized the regularly spaced stumps of old telephone poles to the sides, their cables sometimes visible hanging from cottonwoods. Sunlight reflected off something among the treetops ahead. As the Saladin rolled by, Mackenzie looked up. It was an old gas station sign mounted on a tall rusted pole. The sign was a bright white trapezoid stained by nesting birds, with one red-lettered word in script: Sinclair. Below the word was a green dinosaur with a thick, elephantine body, four legs, a long raised neck with a tiny head, and a long tail. Below that was a white rectangular sign, almost hidden by the trees. The words on the lower sign, visible for only a moment, read: ALIENS WELCOM

“We’re in Roswell!” he shouted down at Freeman. “Watch for zoms!” He stood up and raised the mike to shout a warning—then froze, fighting for self-control. Stay cool, stay cool, stay cool. The Old Man is here. Make your dad proud. He took a slow breath. “Wolf One to Alpha Wolf.”

“We’re in R-town, going down old Second.” He gave a humorless grin. “No Greys in sight.”

Mackenzie put down the mike. With trembling hands he checked the dual grenade launchers to reassure himself that the high explosive rounds and not the fire-starting WP rounds were loaded. A fire in a ruined town was not good, especially if the convoy had to return home by this route. Still, if it was between burning the place down or fighting a few thousand zoms...

More ruins appeared by the roadsides: an old parking lot or used-car dealership that was now a weed field for blackened junk heaps, an overgrown diner with no windows, a block of collapsed brick buildings from which a stand of ponderosa pines rose high into the sky. Movement caught his eye as he admired the pines. He shaded his eyes and looked up.

He quickly picked up the mike. “Turkey vultures, one o’clock,” he said. He counted ten before he gave up and estimated there could be up to thirty or forty. They were circling something half a mile ahead. He prayed it would not turn out to be the remains of recently slaughtered people who had missed rescue by a hair’s breadth. It had happened before in the past, too often to tell about.

The convoy rumbled through intersection after intersection, the buildings now closer together and the blocks shorter. Part of the road was covered by a fallen brick wall at one point, but there was enough room to drive around the rubble through what had once been someone’s front yard.

The place that the vultures were circling drew closer. Mackenzie thought it was only two or three blocks away.

His throat was dust-dry. “Request permission to dismount and investigate a kill site.”

“Hold one.” He crouched again. “Go twenty!” he called to Freeman, then got up and raised the binoculars, scanning. Buildings, another parking lot, a—

“Jesus! Freeman, stop, stop, stop, stop! Jesus Christ!” The Saladin lurched to a halt, throwing Mackenzie forward as the tires skidded on the filthy road. He looked through the binoculars again. It was gone. Had he really seen it? He grabbed the mike.

“Wolf Pack, all stop!” said the Old Man over the radio. “Lock and load!” The convoy creaked to a halt, engines running.

“What the fuck did you see, man?” yelled Freeman. “We got zoms? Answer me, man!”

“It wasn’t a cow! It ran off!” He looked up. The vultures were circling right overhead. He got the mike. “Request permission to dismount!”

“Roger, on the way.” The radio went silent, but Mackenzie could hear the Old Man shouting in the next truck, the deuce-and-a-half with the covered load, just over a hundred feet back. Three men got down from the back of the truck, preparing their weapons.

“Seal the vehicle!” he told Freeman as he got down inside the dark vehicle to get his weapons.

Freeman hit a metal panel with his fist and cursed, but then subsided. Mackenzie slipped on a machete in an over-the-shoulder sheath, checked his assorted sidearms and knives, then grabbed a Thompson submachine gun with a round ammo drum and climbed out of the turret. A minute later he met up with three other soldiers who had between them an antique Browning automatic rifle, a civilian-made semiautomatic shotgun, and an M-16 with a grenade launcher in addition to uncountable lesser weapons. One man, a big white-haired master sergeant named Lucas, had two hatchets stuck into his belt.

“I’ll take point,” Mackenzie told the men. “Stay back and cover me. I think there’s a predator’s kill across that lot. I saw something run off from it, a big animal, but no zoms, nothing like that. We’re gonna make it quick.”

“What kind of animal, sir?” asked Lucas. He surveyed the area, his Remington shotgun aimed up at the circling vultures.

“I heard they don’t usually come down this far,” said Lucas. “You said it was brown, sir?”

“Hey, I smell something,” said the BAR man, lifting his weapon. “Wind’s from that-a-way.”

A light breeze carrying the sick-sweet stench of carrion reached Mackenzie’s nostrils. He looked around, saw nothing moving. “Follow me,” he said. He gripped his Thompson and started toward the weed-choked parking lot, looking left and right. The other men silently fell in behind him, weapons up and ready.

The old parking lot was devoid of wreckage for the most part. A collapsed and overgrown strip mall lay just over a hundred fifty feet ahead. Halfway across the lot, Mackenzie began walking more slowly. It was hard to see through the waist-high weeds growing up from the broken pavement. The nausea-inducing odor of death grew stronger.

He saw a space where the weeds ahead had been flattened. Something dark lay in the middle of it. “Cover me,” he said, raising the Thompson to his shoulder. He took a slow step forward, then another, then—

He blinked in horror. When he recovered he looked around again, then looked back at the shredded, rotting carcass scattered before him. He dared take only one more step to clarify what he was looking at. Then he began to back up.

“Get to the trucks,” he said to the other men. “You see anything move, shoot the motherfucker and don’t stop.”

“No—it killed a bear! It killed a full-grown black bear and tore that motherfucker to pieces!”

Eyes wide, the BAR guy lifted his weapon and held it against his chest. “What killed it?”

“Holy shit,” said the master sergeant, and the next thing Mackenzie heard was a twelve-gauge shotgun blast, a shell ejecting, then a second blast, all in a second’s time. The buck sergeant with the grenade launcher yelled and began firing three-round bursts from his M-16. Mackenzie spun and saw the other men were looking in terror at something behind them. He raised his Thompson to fire but saw nothing to shoot at.

The two sergeants stopped firing at the ruined shopping center. “It went back inside that middle building!” said the master sergeant in awe. “Jesus Mohammad God, it was big!”

“That wasn’t no fucking wolf!” said Lucas, shotgun braced against his shoulder. “Lieutenant’s right, get back to the trucks!”

They picked up speed in their retreat but kept nervously watching behind them. The creature did not reappear. When they reached the convoy, the Old Man was standing by the second truck, scanning the area with binoculars. Everyone else was topside on a vehicle and had a weapon ready.

“Master Sergeant Lucas, Lieutenant Mackenzie!” shouted the Old Man. “Everyone else mount up and get ready to roll!”

Mackenzie could not keep himself from looking back, fearing that something would jump on him from behind at any moment. The general waved the two men over to a spot near the Saladin, away from the other vehicles. “What was it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mackenzie, out of breath. “I thought it was a bear or a wolf at first, but—”

“It was different shades of brown and spotted on the sides, and it came up to my shoulders!” Lucas interrupted. “It wasn’t a wolf!”

“Whatever it was killed a black bear, ripped it apart,” Mackenzie added. “The men shot at it, but it got away, sir.” He realized his heart was thumping like a tank engine. Stay cool, stay cool—

“I got a good look at it, sir,” said Lucas, also trying to calm down. “That wasn’t no goddamn animal that I ever seen.”

Unperturbed, General Armalin fished something out of an unbuttoned shirt pocket. It was a set of cards bound up with string. The cards were bent and worn and very old. As the Old Man shuffled them in his hands, Mackenzie read the words Zoo Animals on the backs of each, with smiling cartoon faces of lions and tigers for decoration and lots of tiny print Mackenzie could not read. The Old Man picked out one card and held it up to Mackenzie and Lucas. “It look like this?” he said.

The card had a color photograph of a strange animal on it. Mackenzie felt the breath catch in his chest. “That’s it!” he said, pointing. “That’s what I saw! That’s it!”

The Old Man put the cards away instead of giving an answer, then glanced over Mackenzie’s shoulder in the direction of the old strip mall. Mackenzie immediately looked back. He saw nothing moving but weeds in a summer breeze.

“They must have escaped from a zoo,” said the Old Man softly. “They’ve got to be breeding in the wild. None of ‘em should’ve lived this long otherwise. An adult can lift a dead horse in its jaws. Could be dozens or even hundreds of ‘em all around us. No wonder we didn’t see any zoms, they ate ‘em all.” He started back to the deuce-and-a-half at a brisk pace. “Mount up and get out, fast as you can,” he said without turning around. “It’s their city, not ours.”

Frustrated for an answer but unwilling to press the issue, Mackenzie went back to the Saladin at a trot, carrying his Thompson. Freeman had the commander's hatch open. “What the fuck is going on?” he called. “Was it a cow or what?”

A madman laughed in a weird high voice that echoed across the ruins. The laughter was loud and came from very close by.

Crazed laughter arose from many places at once, all around the convoy. Whatever was laughing was not human.

Driving straight through Roswell had been a very serious error. They were dead center in a city of monsters.

Freeman had vanished back inside the turret. Mackenzie did not remember getting up the side of the Saladin. He dropped through the hatchway and pulled the hatch shut, locking it in a flash. “Get us the fuck out of here!” he roared.

Freeman threw the vehicle into gear. The Saladin’s tires spun before catching traction, flinging dirt behind it in a wide cloud. The rest of the convoy thundered along behind. Insane laughter filled the wreckage of the city as they left.

U.S. 70, 30 miles southwest of Alamogordo
White Sands Missile Range
Former state of New Mexico
Tuesday evening, August 31, 1999

To Mackenzie’s surprise, the White Sands really were white. Gypsum crystals, said the Old Man. There had been a lake covering the basin a few millions years ago until it dried out and left the startling white dunes west of the highway where the convoy was encamped for the night. Mackenzie was surprised the Old Man would admit even in a roundabout way that he wasn’t a Bible thumper. It wasn’t politic these days to profess otherwise, but the Old Man clearly believed in revelation of the scientific variety, not so much the religious. It was impossible to say the Old Man wasn’t religious, however. It was impossible to say much about him as a fact, for that matter.

Mackenzie sat on the cracked highway pavement with his back against one of the Saladin’s middle tires, facing west toward the ragged silhouette of the San Andres Mountains as he ate a late dinner by his campfire. It was still quite warm out and pleasant, the entire sky aflame with brilliant stars. The old White Sands Missile Range lay in a flat valley between the San Andres and Sacramento Mountains, which ran north-south and nicely boxed the missile range in. Many of the most famous places of scientific, technological, and military legend lay close by. Mackenzie had eagerly read about them at Buxton Ridge: the ruins of the first atomic city, Alamogordo, through which they had passed two hours earlier; the missile range itself, said to have been one of the old U.S.A.’s first spaceports; Holloman Air Force Base, a vital testing and training grounds for air and space research they had passed by before stopping for the night; and the holiest of holies for the technophile, Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been exploded over half a century earlier, assuming the pre-Zom histories were correct. Some books even said parts for the Apollo program had been tested here. It was a mixed honor, given the theory that the Zom had been a by-product of an alien virus picked up on the Moon thirty years earlier.

The missile range was a technological El Dorado. Mackenzie reflected that there was any number of places that Andrew Landon and his Army escorts could be at that moment. Once the convoy had come to a full stop on the highway, the Old Man had cut Landon and six men loose. Leading the men was the captain Mackenzie had spoken with the day before, the buoyant Rhodes, but it was clear that Landon was calling all the shots. They had taken the general’s deuce-and-a-half with its covered load of equipment and driven northeast back in the direction of Alamogordo or Holloman. Questions from soldiers about the group’s destination went unanswered. The Old Man acted as if he had forgotten the matter as soon as the truck was out of sight. Mackenzie wondered again if Freeman was right, that a lot of things were going on with this mission about which few people knew, even among those in the convoy.

“So, that old saying about Texans never running from a fight isn’t true after all.”

Mackenzie paused in middle of raising a warm spoonful of franks and beans to his mouth, then slowly shook his head and ate it anyway. The observation did not merit a polite response. A moment later, Jodie Landon walked into view around the side of the Saladin and stood looking down at him across from the small campfire he had built for heating his dinner and providing light. No one else was around. Mackenzie had hoped to keep it that way, but now—

Jodie still wore a simple white skirt and blouse of company issue, undoubtedly a clean set. The way she carried herself she looked like a teenage fashion model, standing in the firelight with the backdrop of stars and night behind her. She wore low walking shoes and ankle socks that left her smooth shins bare. From where he sat with his back against one of the Saladin’s huge tires, he was exactly on eye level with her skirt-covered crotch. He lowered his gaze to his meal.

“If I don’t have a plate. Aren’t you up past your bedtime?” He finished off the franks and beans, then tossed the can to one side and wiped his mouth on his fatigue sleeve.

“Oh, that was nice,” she said in mild disgust. “Don’t officers use napkins?”

“If the Army had wanted us to have them, they would have issued us a few.” He fished a small can opener out of a shirt pocket and picked up another can by his side.

“It’s probably all true, so I don’t need to listen. Don’t you have a new big gun to work on or something?” He said it to give her the brush off, but it came out in a teasing, flirtatious way that he did not intend or like.

He exhaled. Her introductory comment had pissed him off and he wanted her to go away, but the way she was talking made it hard to concentrate on that goal. “You want some peaches?” he asked, angry with himself for offering.

“I’d loan you my spoon, but I’m using it.” He finished opening the small can and held it out. “They’re good peaches. Nothing but the best for this man’s Army.”

“No, thanks.” She had her hands on her hips, posing, looking him over in a contemplative manner. It was hard to believe she was only eighteen. “They said you walked right up to the building where the hyena was hiding and dared it to come out.”

“Daddy wouldn’t let me look out of the cab. I couldn’t see what was going on.”

“Sergeant Lucas said the thing he saw was five feet high at the shoulders. Spotted hyenas don’t get that big.”

He remembered his momentary impression of the creature through the binoculars. “That one sure did.”

“So I hear.” He finished the peaches and tossed away the can after drinking the leftover juice. “I’d like to hear your personal first-hand impression of those little fellas next time we drive back that way.”

“General Armalin said we’re not going back the same way. We’re going around Roswell next time, not through it.”

The comment made him laugh. He coughed on a bit of food and covered his mouth with the back of his hand before recovering. He still laughed a little afterward. “We did shoot it,” he finally said. “It didn’t seem to notice.”

Her attitude was beginning to grate. “Guess you had to be there,” he said without looking up. He picked up another can and read the lid. “Sure you don’t want some of this? Got some molasses cookies here. They’re pretty good. Army buys ‘em from Barbados. Best molasses cookies in the world.”

He began to open the can, still halfway between being intrigued and annoyed with her. “I wasn’t even aware we were dating.”

She didn’t answer right away. She watched him work on the can until he had it open. “Why does everyone call General Armalin the ‘Old Man’?” she asked at last. “He’s not even forty. My daddy’s older than he is by over a decade.”

Mackenzie lowered the can and looked up at her with a raised eyebrow. “I would have thought someone like you would know everything there was to know about potential customers for your goods.”

“Weapons. What goods were you talking about?” He picked out a cookie and bit into it.

“Life’s a bitch like that,” he said through a mouthful of cookies. He reached for his canteen.

Mackenzie took a long swallow of water from the canteen, then screwed the cap back on and put it on the asphalt beside him. “To start with, he walked all the way to Texas from a little Ohio town near Toledo, not far from Detroit.”

“I know where Toledo is.” She watched him finish the cookies. “Lots of people walked to Texas, some from further away than that. So what?”

“He was twelve at the time.” He tossed the can aside, stifled a burp, and looked through his rations for a final snack. “Family was dead. They were living in a white suburb before the Zom. He thought maybe he’d be safer down south.”

“Everyone knows that.” He was suddenly tired of the conversation and wanted to end it. “Everyone except you.”

She glared. It was nothing more than the narrowing of her eyes, but something about it was not the same as when other women glared. It seemed that something missing in her look, and what was missing was any evidence of rational restraint. “Don’t talk to me like that,” she whispered. “No one ever talks to me like that.”

“First time for everything.” He lost his appetite and leaned back against the tire. When was this princess going to get the hint?

Mackenzie had not heard that word in years. It sounded archaic. “I’m happy for you.”

“I’ve shot them with every kind of gun there is. I killed most of them with my own handgun.”

“I hope it was a gun your daddy made. Damn shame if you had to use one made by someone else.”

She walked around the fire and knelt down close to him, balancing on the balls of her shoes with her knees tightly together and her arms crossed over her thighs. She was at eye level with him now, her back to the little fire.

“You know how Landon Armaments tests its weapons?” she said in a level, emotionless tone. “You know how we know if a weapon we make will do the job we say it will? We test it on zombies.”

“We have people all around the country trap them and drive them to a testing facility near Abilene. We keep them locked up in outdoor pens till we need them. If we want to see what a weapon does, we cut a zombie out of the herd and get him to chase a man sitting in the back of a pickup truck driving away from the stockade. Then we shoot him while he’s running. That’s how we know what our weapons will do.”

He said nothing as he stared at her. He had long ago heard rumors to this effect but had thought they were just stories. He had never imagined he would have confirmation of this practice, and certainly not from someone like her.

“We shoot men and women, old and young, big and small, fat and thin,” she continued. “Sometimes we chain them up in groups and shoot them, sometimes we tie them to posts, sometimes we shoot them when they’re milling around in the pens. We shoot them any old way we like. And I get to shoot them, too. My daddy said it was good for me to do it. I drive over to Abilene on weekends and shoot zombies every chance I get. The employees call me the Queen of the Dead.”

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Mackenzie said in a soft voice. “You ought to do the shooting when they’re coming right at you, a bunch of them all at once that haven’t been chained up. You ought to do it when you’re all by yourself instead of with company guards all around. That would be a better way of testing your weapons, don’t you think?”

“You can go to hell,” she said, her voice rising. “I’ve killed more zombies than everyone else in this damn expedition put together. I’ve killed two thousand nine hundred and sixteen of them exactly. I keep count of every one. No one else alive has killed so many, no one anywhere, not even you. And you tell me you respect a man whose only achievement was to walk to Texas, but you won’t respect me for what I’ve done? I don’t deserve to be treated like that, you worthless son of a black-trash bitch!”

“Only black trash bitch I’ve ever known in my entire life,” he said, “I’m looking at right now.”

For an instant he thought he saw actual flames roar up in her eyes. He put it down to a trick of the firelight. Maybe.

“You’re not a real man,” she whispered. “You ran off from a dumb animal. A real man would never have run.”

“Shooting zoms in a pen is like stepping on ants. Anyone can do it.” On a cold impulse he added, “There’s nothing special about you, girl.”

He thought she might strike him, but then something changed in her eyes. Her look became seductive and wicked. Her lips curved up in a faint smile. She rocked an inch or two from side to side, sitting on her heels. Then she moved one foot aside so that her legs parted, as wide as they could within the confines of her skirt. Her fingers pulled the hem of her skirt up over her knees.

The thin material of her clothing let enough firelight through to perfectly illuminate everything between her thighs. She wore nothing underneath the skirt. Nothing at all.

“Do you think you’re a real man?” she purred, watching his expression. “A real man would know what to do with that. A real man would’ve had me flat on my back right now pounding it home, and I’d let him do it. Are you that kind of a man?” Her expression became ferocious. “Or are you thinking about pounding it into that white zombie girl we’re supposed to rescue? Is that what turns you on, slipping it to zombies instead of a woman like me? Is that what kind of man you are, boy?”

He tore his gaze away from the hypnotic tangle of curled hair between her thighs and looked her in the face with undisguised hatred.

She shot to her feet and kicked him as hard as she could. “Fuck you!” she yelled, then she stamped away.

He let out his breath in a long sigh and rubbed the sore spot on his shin where she had kicked him. He had originally planned to sit and enjoy the crystal-clear view of the night sky from the middle of a desert, but he wasn’t in the mood now. He sat there for a while, reviewing the whole incident, then sighed and got to his feet to take a walk.

The shirtless, hatless corporal ignored the reprimand and took Mackenzie by the arm. The odor of burnt marijuana surrounded him like a thick cloud. “Look, man,” Freeman said, “I’m going to talk to you like a brother and not like the Army thing, okay? You need to hear this from someone who’s been there.”

“That right there—” Freeman pointed in the direction that Jodie Landon had left “—is the meanest pussy that ever walked this planet. It’s not even pussy, it’s more like tiger pussy, the man-eater kind. Bite your thing right off. I’m not joking. You get your business in there and it’s gone.”

“Brother, I’m telling you this for your own good. You’ll wake up one morning and say, ‘Shit! Where’s my artillery? Where’s my main gun?’ And she’ll be walking off looking like she’s chewing up a hot dog, know what I’m saying?”

“That bitch is part of what’s so messed up about this little caravanserai. We’re like swimming around in a pool full of barracudas pretending to be on our side, but someone’s throwing sharks in the pool, too. And tiger pussy, that too. You’re damn lucky I saved your—”

Mackenzie grabbed the corporal by the throat and dragged the thinner man’s face up to his own. After a long red moment, literally shaking with fury, he realized what he was doing. Aghast, he slowly let Freeman go and staggered back, awash in horror and shame.

The corporal rubbed his throat and coughed, but he did not seem particularly upset about being attacked. “Oh, almost forgot,” he said. “The reason I came by is because the Old Man wants to see you. He’s down by the ninety at the end of the line.”

“Shit!” Furious, Mackenzie kicked the campfire into instant extinction. The Old Man must have heard what was going on. It was over. Everything Mackenzie had wanted just went down the drain. He would never make his dad proud.

The stoned Freeman clapped a friendly hand on Mackenzie’s back. “Glad to help a brother out. Anytime.”

Mackenzie left with a painful limp before the renewed temptation to strangle the corporal grew too strong to resist. He did not see Jodie among the people standing by the line of vehicles parked on the roadway. Many of the men looked away or pretended to be checking the trucks and equipment. He didn’t care if everyone had heard what happened. Getting thrown out of the Army was better than being around a soulless creature like Jodie Landon. The giant bear-eating hyenas of Roswell didn’t seem so bad, now.

Mackenzie found the bald general standing with his hands in his fatigue pockets a short walk past the de-tracked tank destroyer and its tractor-trailer. An ancient and battered eight-track tape player sat on the end of the M36’s trailer, playing a fast-moving but unfamiliar song over damaged speakers. The set-up looked like it had been taken out of an old car and crudely connected to a vehicle battery, with wires strung all over from the player to the speakers. Someone with an odd accent was singing about a nineteenth nervous breakdown, accompanied by guitars and drums.

The Old Man was looking up at the stars. Mackenzie stopped six feet short of him and snapped to attention with a salute. “Lieutenant Mackenzie reporting, sir.”

“At ease.” The Old Man never saluted back or looked down from the stars. “You can see the Milky Way from here, even with the full Moon,” he said, taking a hand from a pocket and pointing. “See that? That band there?”

Mackenzie stood at parade rest, feet apart and hands behind his back. He felt like he was in front of a firing squad that was taking its own sweet time loading its rifles. “Yes, sir.”

Mackenzie took a deep breath. He had no idea what was going on and hoped the Old Man wasn’t playing games with him. “It’s our galaxy, sir. We’re looking at it edge-on, from inside it, so it looks like a white band in the sky.”

The Old Man nodded and put his hand back in his pocket. “You’re a smart man, lieutenant, a smart man and an honorable man. You keep your head when nobody else can or will. I like that.”

“That’s why I’m putting the care of that girl out there in California in your hands,” the Old Man went on. “Soon as we find her, if we do find her, you’re going to be responsible for her. That’s why you have the only armored vehicle we could find that we could seal off, aside from the M36 which can’t do a damn thing on its own. Keep her in the armored car when you have to, and keep her alive. That’s your only real mission here. Do that if you do nothing else.”

“We got to the Moon, lieutenant,” said the Old Man, looking to the east where the Moon hung low over the dark Sacramento ridge. “I use the royal ‘we’ when I say that, but we did it, the human race did. We got there. Damn shame what happened after that, but we did it. One day we’ll go back. We’ll go to the Moon, and then to Jupiter, which is that bright star next to the Moon, and then to Saturn, which is right next to it, and we’ll go on to the rest of the universe after that. It’s our destiny. Jesus is not coming down to stop the show anytime soon. We’re still on our own here and will be for a long time to come. We’ll go back to the Moon and make it ours.”

General Armalin lowered his gaze and fixed his dark eyes on Mackenzie. “The only way we’ll do it, though, is to find out what started the Zom, and then turn it off. That’s what this mission is about, lieutenant. We’re going to find out what made nine-tenths of the human race go mad, and we’re going to stop it. Beats the living hell out of me how we’re going to do it, but we’re damn sure going to do it or die trying. We’ll probably die anyway. If we do what we’ve set out to do, it won’t matter if we’re gone or how we went. The rest of the world will be free of the horrors of the last thirty years. We’ll be the ones who wiped it away.”

The Old Man looked for a moment at the broken pavement at their feet, then turned to look north at the stars again. “It’s beautiful, the future is,” he said. “It’s worth dying for, to save it.”

The Old Man nodded, then swung his head back to face Mackenzie. “If anything happens to the rest of us, lieutenant, anything at all,” he said in a calm, conversational tone, “you’re to take the armored car and keep going. Find the girl and find out what she knows. Do everything in your power to stop the Zom. You are permitted everything in order to do this, if it will save what’s left of the human race in the end. We’re not here to quibble over morality. We’re here to make sure there will be morality in existence long after we’re gone.”

Mackenzie opened his mouth but was too stunned to speak. The general pulled a folded scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to Mackenzie. “That’s the girl’s broadcasting frequency. I’ve got someone listening to her right now, but your vehicle will pick it up as well as mine. I made sure of that. Don’t try to talk to her until you get to the old state line and you’re in California itself. Don’t get her hopes up until you’re almost there.”

“What if it’s a trap, sir?” he asked, tucking the paper into a shirt pocket. He had no idea how the idea got into his head, but he asked anyway.

“It isn’t,” said the Old Man. “I can tell. Beats hell out of me how she’s not turned into a zom herself. Maybe she’ll let you in on her secret. I’d sure love to know.”

The general smiled. “Son, all I know is, she isn’t lying. Her name’s Daria, by the way. Funny kind of name. No last name, apparently. Just Daria.”

“I bet she’s got a one hell of a story to tell.” The Old Man looked up at the stars. “Good night, lieutenant.”

“Good night, sir.” Hardly able to think, Mackenzie walked away. He did not remember until later he had failed to salute before he left. As he walked by the last trailer, the singer on the eight track said he was pleased to meet you and hoped you would guess his name. It was a catchy tune. Ooo, ooo. Ooo, ooo.

No one spoke to Mackenzie as he went back to the Saladin and sat on top of its turret with his knees drawn up, looking south at the glittering stars over the black road ahead. The rising Moon made the white sands to the west seem to glow. It was a landscape one would see only in dreams.

“Daria,” Mackenzie whispered again. He wondered what she was like. He could not imagine it. He wondered why the Old Man had not chewed him out over Jodie Landon, if the general had even known about the episode, and why the Old Man had instead picked him to protect the girl. He recalled the general’s words and wondered what could possibly happen that would leave him, a minor Army lieutenant named Michael James Mackenzie, as the sole survivor of an outrageously well-equipped and heavily armed military expedition. He began to be afraid that he would soon find out.

U.S. 70, 30 miles southwest of Alamogordo
White Sands Missile Range
Former state of New Mexico
Wednesday morning, September 1, 1999

By ten o’clock the next morning, the sky was a deep infinite blue unmarred by cloud. The sun was a blinding white ball of silent flame. The desert was an inferno.

Every vehicle had its doors and windows open to catch the smallest breeze. Tractor cabs were draped with blankets to keep the seats and steering wheels from becoming too hot to touch. Men stripped down to fatigue trousers and took refuge in whatever shade could be found, keeping their weapons near at hand. No one spoke or moved, except by the rear tractor-trailer where the expedition’s two remaining officers and three NCOs, missing only Captain Rhodes, sat or lay in the shade of the immobilized tank destroyer. There, as men will, they argued about trivia.

“General!” Master Sergeant Lucas turned around where he sat on the pavement to make a direct appeal to the Old Man. “You ever heard of a movie like that, sir?”

The Old Man had his cap pulled down over his face as he lay by the trailer’s rear tires. “A movie like what?” he said at last.

Mackenzie lay on his back in the tank destroyer’s shadow and smiled. His sweat-soaked shirt was unbuttoned to his belt, but the rest of his clothes were orderly. It was obvious the other five in the group knew each other from way back. Old Army is the same everywhere. Mackenzie kept his mouth shut, feeling he was too new to butt into their conversation, but he enjoyed the chatter thoroughly.

“I am not! You shut up!” Lucas prodded the Old Man. “Sir, it was about this brother who was the last man alive on earth. Everybody else died but him, and he—”

“Shut up and give him a chance to talk! You remember seeing anything like that on TV, sir?”

The Old Man exhaled before he shook his head from side to side. “I don’t remember it, but—”

“—but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a movie like that,” the Old Man finished. “There could have been. I didn’t see everything there was on the tube.”

Every head turned toward the new voice. No one had heard the wiry Freeman walk up. He wore fatigue pants and nothing else. He appeared unaffected by the heat, as if he had always lived in places like this.

“Did you tell everyone to drink a canteen of water?” said Mackenzie without opening his eyes.

Mackenzie sighed and sat up with the greatest reluctance. “I’ll talk to ‘em. Can’t have anyone coming down with heat stroke. Thanks for getting it started.”

The master sergeant shrugged. “We was just talking about a movie,” he said with reluctance.

“Oh, I get it,” said Freeman in a wounded manner. “The Alphas don’t want to talk to the Epsilons. I’m too low on the socio-military totem pole to engage in conversation with my superiors.”

Mackenzie grimaced as he collected his weapons and put them back in their holsters and sheaths. “Come on, Freeman, don’t start.”

“Sure, I’ll shut up. I’ll be a good field hand. I’ll just go back to my vehicle and pick watermelon seeds out of my ‘fro and mind my own—”

Lucas held up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right! Damn, son! We was talking about this movie I saw on TV when I was a kid. It was science fiction, kind of. There was this brother who was the last man on earth, and he—”

Freeman snapped his fingers. “The World, The Flesh and The Devil. Black and white movie from nineteen fifty-nine, starring Harry Belafonte—”

“Yes!” Lucas roared with glee. “That’s it! That’s the one I was talking about!”

“Harry Belafonte was playing this mine inspector,” said Freeman, ignoring the catcalls. “There was a cave-in, and he—”

“Yes! Yes! That’s it!” cried Lucas. He almost came to his feet in his excitement. “They started to dig him out, but then they left him down there!”

“That’s because the rescuers died from fallout,” Freeman said. “There was an atomic war—”

“You remember that scene with the bridge?” cried Lucas. “All them cars sitting there empty and no one was around anywhere but that one guy? And later when he was walking around New York City and there wasn’t a soul around but him? Man, that scared my ass to death!”

“Keep it down, Carl,” grumbled the Old Man from under his hat. “I’m trying to think.”

“I didn’t see it,” said Freeman. There was a sudden silence as the others looked at him in astonishment. “I read about it, okay?” he went on. “I had this book about black people in the cinema, actors and directors, and it had a whole chapter about that movie. It had pictures from the film, like of Belafonte with that white lady, forgot her name—”

“White guy?” said a staff sergeant. “Wait a minute, you said this brother was the last man on earth, but now you say there was a white guy there, too? I knew you both was lying!”

“I’m out of here,” Mackenzie said, waving goodbye and trying not to laugh. “Freeman, you’re doing pretty well here. Take a break.” He put on his cap and walked away.

“Nah, I gotta find my stash, man,” said Freeman, looking annoyed. “Someone took it last night. I can’t function without a toke, man.”

Mackenzie rolled his eyes and kept walking, determined not to look back and get involved.

“Corporal,” the Old Man growled from under his cap, “if I can do without drinking for a week or two, despite the terrible suffering and inconvenience it causes me, you can do without your dope. You smoke too much weed anyway. It’s making you paranoid.”

“Sir, I don’t have to be paranoid to think some seriously weird shit is going down around here,” Freeman said. “We’re ass-deep in the Twilight Zone.” He turned and looked after Mackenzie. “Hey, lieutenant!”

Freeman hurried after Mackenzie, who was walking up the line of vehicles toward the Saladin. “Lieutenant, can I talk to you for a second?” he called.

“If I’d known I’d have to put up with you when I got in the Army,” Mackenzie muttered, “I’d have gone into real estate.”

“Nah, seriously, I got to talk to you, sir,” said Freeman. “It’s important. I mean it.”

That made Freeman laugh. “Hey, that’s funny. I’m really an older brother, you know? My kid brother’s named Riley. He was a pain when we were kids. You got any brothers or sisters, sir?”

“Yeah, my brother and I lived with my grandfather when we were little. He sure was cool. Wish he was around now.”

They arrived at the head of the parked convoy, in front of the Saladin, and stood there in full searing daylight. Mackenzie turned to ask what was on the corporal’s mind.

“You know what this is, sir?” Freeman said first. The corporal held out what appeared to be an old-style ink pen, bright yellow in color. It had a clip on one end, doubtless to attach it to a shirt pocket.

Mackenzie frowned. It was too hot to think straight. “What are you talking about?”

Mackenzie had never heard Freeman sound so grave and concerned. He took the object and held it up. The yellow device had a small symbol stamped on it: a blue circle, inside of which was a white triangle. Inside the triangle were two red stylized letters: CD.

“What the hell,” Mackenzie said in a whisper. He held up the yellow tube and peered down the barrel, which was sealed with glass at both ends like a tiny telescope. “Where’d you get this?”

Peering through the tube, Mackenzie saw a numbered grid line inscribed on the translucent rear glass. The front glass piece was a lens that focused on the calibrations. A straight vertical line appeared to float over the low end of the scale. Above the scale was a single word: MILLIROENTGENS.

“It’s a Civil Defense radiation dosimeter,” he breathed. “We used one these back in science class in school. They haven’t made these since the sixties. Where the hell did you—”

“Keep it down, sir! Sorry I had to make up all that stuff about my stash being gone. I keep my weed in the front left toolbox, right there. I had to get you away from everyone else. Tiger Pussy had it in her carry-all.”

Freeman looked uncomfortable and unhappy. “Well, she came on to me this morning, sir. She asked me if I wanted to get paid a lot of money and maybe score some free cooch. She wanted me to be her bodyguard in return, maybe help her with a little project, but I told her I had herpes. I don’t have it, just so you know, but I wasn’t about to drive my Patton into that nasty little swamp and risk getting—”

“Hold it, hold it!” Mackenzie’s mind reeled. “She tried to recruit you? Where is she now?”

“Tiger Puss?” Freeman started to turn in the direction of the white dunes, but stopped himself. “She went over that way with a couple of the men. She said she had to pee and wanted protection from whatever, spiders, I don’t know. She’s been gone for a while, about a half hour.”

Mackenzie stared at the object in his hand, trying to sort out the implications. “Maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Maybe she and her dad thought we might run into radiation on the trip.”

“Where are we going to do that, sir? I don’t remember reading about any nuclear war when the Zom hit. There wasn’t any war except for white people killing black folk.” Freeman’s eyes narrowed. “Are we supposed to be hunting for A-bombs, sir? I know that maybe you can’t tell me, but—”

“No, that’s not it at all! We’re—damn it, I can’t tell you right now what we’re supposed to do, but that isn’t it!” Mackenzie briefly wondered if the Landons were indeed secretly using the expedition to hunt for nuclear weapons, perhaps with the Army’s (and the Old Man’s) permission, but if that were the case wouldn’t Andrew Landon have taken the dosimeter with him? Old relics like the dosimeter were priceless if they still worked. “There has to be a good explanation for this,” he finally said, knowing how lame that sounded even as he said it.

“Of course there is, sir.” Freeman reached into another pants pocket. “Maybe then you can explain why she had this, too.” He pulled out a small brown bottle and handed it to Mackenzie.

Pills rattled inside the little bottle. Mackenzie read the label aloud in a whisper. “Potassium iodide, twenty tablets, a hundred thirty milligrams, adults take one per day for ten—”

“Isn’t that stuff supposed to protect the thyroid gland in case we wade through nuclear waste or something?” asked the corporal. “I read in this old—”

“Yes, damn it!” Mackenzie looked around and saw no one nearby. “I have to talk to the Old Man about this. I’ll tell him about Miss Landon trying to bribe you—”

“Just leave out the herpes thing, okay? I don’t want to get rumors started about my business, y’ know?”

“Christ. Sure, fine, I won’t mention it.” Mackenzie looked around once more, frustrated and worried. “What the hell’s going on around here?”

“Shit, man, I’ve been saying that since before we left, and you’re only now catching on?”

“Stay here. Act like you’re smoking pot or something, but stay by the vehicle. And get a gun, but keep it hidden.”

“Man, I always have heat,” said Freeman. “Remember what I said about not saying anything about—”

Mackenzie walked back to the end of the convoy along the side in full daylight to avoid meeting anyone. The yellow dosimeter and pill bottle went into his pockets. What would he say to the Old Man? How would he explain this? The Army was in charge of the expedition, on the surface, and they did have the right to search the belongings of civilians who were going along for the ride, but did that rule apply when it came to the Landons, who had practically rearmed Texas in the last decade and become mega-millionaires?

“Henry Aaron could’ve done it,” said Lucas. “He could’ve beaten Babe’s record.”

“Sir?” said Mackenzie. Everyone turned to look up at him—except for the Old Man, who gave out a deep sigh from under his cap. “No rest for the wicked. Go on, lieutenant.”

“I think you need to look at this, sir.” He bent down and held out the dosimeter.

The Old Man reached up with one hand. Without removing his cap or opening his eyes, his fingers closed unerringly on the dosimeter. He held it in the air like that for a long moment without looking at it. Everyone watched. No one spoke.

The Old Man abruptly sat up and put on his cap. He stuck the dosimeter in his shirt pocket. “Top,” he said to the master sergeant, “get everybody up. Do it quietly. Tell ‘em we might be moving out at a moment’s notice.”

“I meant,” said the Old Man with a dark look around, “get everyone up right this goddamn second. Keep it quiet, but do it now.”

The men scrambled to their feet and took off up the convoy line. The Old Man swung around to Mackenzie, blocking him from leaving. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

Mackenzie shoved aside his astonishment that the Old Man had not looked once at the dosimeter, yet appeared to have a grip on the seriousness of the situation. “Jodie Landon tried to bribe Corporal Freeman and recruit him for some mission,” said Mackenzie, so quickly his words almost ran together. “He found that—and this—” He pulled out the pill bottle and handed it over “—in her belongings. I apologize if she was supposed to have this with her, but—”

The Old Man cut him off while examining the bottle. “She wasn’t, not that I know of. It’s not illegal to have this stuff, but…” His voice trailed off as he looked around. “Where is she?”

“Master sergeant!” shouted the Old Man, turning away from Mackenzie. “Find Miss Landon and have her see me at once!”

Mackenzie heard the stutter of automatic pistol fire. Ricocheting bullets screamed off steel, punctured truck doors, smashed out windows. Men cried out and fell. Mackenzie saw it happen and froze in disbelief, watching men stagger and drop in the hail of gunfire—then his training kicked in. He went for the .357 Magnum in his back holster and got down behind the rear of the trailer, partially shielded by the folded-up wheel ramps. He spotted something move along the top of a white dune over fifty yards away. He raised the Smith & Wesson and aimed the long barrel with both hands, waiting for a clear shot.

Something hit Mackenzie’s left arm with a stinging blow. The Magnum fired wildly and slipped from his nerveless hands. Mackenzie fell backward on the cracked asphalt, unable to make his left arm work properly. It felt numb. He looked in the direction that a moment ago had been behind him, away from the white dunes, and saw a standing figure thirty or forty yards off aiming what appeared to be an assault rifle at the trucks. The weapon jumped, firing on full automatic.

Mackenzie could not believe his eyes. The shooter was one of the soldiers from the convoy, gunning down the soldiers who had taken cover on the side of the convoy away from the sand dunes. Men screamed and fell as their blood splattered vehicles and the highway alike.

Mackenzie rolled and grabbed his revolver with his right hand, then rolled the other direction, came up on one knee, aimed, and fired over and over until he saw the shooter jerk and go down. He started to get up, then saw that his left arm was covered in blood from his elbow to the fingers of his hand. The fatigue sleeve was ripped out on one side. He turned his arm over and saw bone fragments mixed with bloody tissue from a hole in the middle of his left forearm. Part of his arm was missing, as if someone had taken a pair of pliers and ripped the flesh out.

“Son of a bitch,” he said in dull surprise. He heard more automatic fire from the dunes as well as return fire from the convoy. He tried to ignore his arm as he raised the pistol and aimed at top of the nearest dune, waiting for a target.

The engine of the ancient M36 tank destroyer coughed and thundered to life. The roar shook the ground under Mackenzie’s boots. Mackenzie stared up at the old tank, his revolver still aimed at the dunes, then saw the tank barrel rise. With a whining, grinding clatter, the tank destroyer’s turret swung the long ninety-millimeter barrel in the direction of the dunes.

Mackenzie’s left arm began to hurt. He knew he was badly wounded but intended to wait for someone to appear among the dunes, someone he could shoot at.

It then occurred to him that the tank destroyer was about to solve the problem. He also realized that when it did solve the problem, it was going to hurt like unholy hell to be anywhere near the tank gun when it went off.

Running did not occur to him. He turned away from the tank, covering his right ear with his gun arm. He heard the turret stop turning, then heard the gun barrel change elevation.

When is that stupid thing going to fire? he thought. And who the hell is in th—

The concussion ended all thought. It was so loud Mackenzie did not later recall hearing it. When he came to, he was staggering down the highway away from the convoy. He did not remember getting there and had no idea what he was doing. An intense stabbing pain ran through his head from ear to ear, accompanied by a shrill scream that did not end. Can’t hear, gone deaf, he thought. He looked down. He still had his pistol in his right hand. His left arm did nothing and burned like it was on fire. He looked back and noticed a trail of blood leading from where he stood going all the way back to the rear of the tank destroyer’s trailer. I need help, he thought. I need to get help. He began walking back to the convoy, left arm limp at his side. I need to get help.

Men lay on the ground on both sides of the line of trucks. Some cried in pain or begged for assistance. Other men were giving first aid to the wounded or still shooting in all directions away from the convoy. A huge cloud of smoke rose into the perfect blue sky from the white sand dunes. One of the dunes had been cut in two by a wide smoldering crater. It was impossible to tell if the trucks were still being fired upon. It was impossible to hear anything at all except for the endless shriek from his injured eardrums.

He reached a fallen soldier and knelt down next to him. The man had been shot in the back in three places. Blood ran down the side of the tank destroyer next to them. Mackenzie put down his .357, felt for a pulse on the fallen man, found none, then got to his feet again. He went to the next fallen man and saw that the man was alive and holding his stomach with both hands. The man had no shirt on. Mackenzie knelt beside the man and tried to talk to him, but he could not hear what he was saying over the long scream in his head. The man did nothing but clutch his bloodied abdomen, teeth gritted in pain. As Mackenzie watched, the man rolled onto his face and stopped moving. Mackenzie shook the man’s shoulder. It had no effect. He then felt the side of the man’s neck. He was gone. Mackenzie rose to his knees and looked down at the dead soldier, trying to remember his name. He had not caught the names of most of the privates and lower NCOs. He felt vague regret over that.

A hand waved up and down in front of Mackenzie’s face. He looked up. It was Freeman, his face filled with horror. Freeman had a strange black weapon in one hand, something like an automatic pistol with a long suppressor, a wide coiled clip, and a wire stock. He was shouting at the lieutenant, but Mackenzie could not understand a word of what the corporal was saying. He smokes too much weed anyway, Mackenzie thought. The world began to slip away. His arm did not hurt so much now. It felt like it would be a good idea to get some sleep. He felt himself falling over and imagined he was in bed at home, his dad snoring in the next room. Then he knew nothing at all.

U.S. 60, between Socorro and Quemado
Former state of New Mexico
Wednesday afternoon, September 1, 1999

Mackenzie found it easier to stand up in the Saladin’s turret if he supported himself with his right elbow on the lip of the gunner’s hatch while bracing his left boot against a stacked ammo box by the ladder below. Keeping the sling for his left arm tied against his chest also helped, though he credited much of his consciousness to the bursts of agony from his gunshot wound whenever the Saladin’s bad shocks jolted after hitting broken asphalt or debris. Medication scarcely diminished the pain. The dry wind blowing in his face helped, however, as did the breeze flowing through the crew compartment from the open driver’s window in front. At least he could hear again.

He checked the old map gripped in his right hand. Freeman had briefly mentioned that the Old Man had changed the driving route after the firefight. The convoy had crossed a rugged pass in the San Andres Mountains into the outskirts of Las Cruses, then instead of continuing west had gone north on old U.S. 85, paralleling the Rio Grande. Mackenzie drifted in and out of consciousness, occasionally standing up in the turret to see where they were as they drove for hours through the Rio Grande valley. There was nothing to see but rocky desert with barren hills and cliffs to either side, with occasional rusted-out car bodies to the sides. Vultures, deer, and shrubs were the only wildlife he remembered. At the place where a small town called Socorro was supposed to be, though no trace of it could be found, the convoy turned left on old U.S. 60 and headed westward once again through low hills and then into flat, open desert. The convoy was able to reach forty miles an hour thanks to the good condition of the two-lane road, at times covered by windblown dust but almost always clear.

Mackenzie had a lot to ask both Freeman and the Old Man when they next encamped. He wanted to know first how many men had survived the ambush and what condition they were in. At least they were able to keep all four remaining trucks on the road, despite damage incurred during the shootout. The fuel truck was in good shape. This made Mackenzie suspect the ambushers had wanted to keep it intact for other purposes. The survivors of the attack had loaded up and left immediately at General Armalin’s direction. Only the dead had stayed behind. Mackenzie remembered hearing that much before passing out a second or third time at the old camp.

The fate of the attackers and what and who had motivated them were also hot issues on his agenda. Mackenzie believed Andrew had been in on the plan as well as Jodie. The six soldiers who had gone off exploring with Andrew Landon would likely not be seen again. He wondered what had been under the canvas on the back of the deuce-and-a-half. Bomb-detecting and dismantling tools, he guessed, but it wasn’t relevant anymore.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out why the Old Man had changed the route. With the Army out of the way, someone would have to come in and pick up the pieces. Seizing control of the convoy’s vehicles and equipment would greatly help a second expedition sent out after the first one, especially if the second expedition was bankrolled by Landon Armaments. The ambush was a reasonable if not perfect way to acquire military firepower otherwise unavailable to a private company, even a company as huge and poorly regulated—and undoubtedly corrupt—as Landon’s.

All that had stopped that plan from working was a nosy corporal finding the dosimeter and pills in Jodie’s belongings. But for that, Mackenzie knew he would be just another bullet-riddled body by the roadside. None of that explained why the Landons had wanted the convoy to begin with. Were they atom-bomb hunting, as Freeman suggested? Had they ever planned to rescue that girl in California and learn what she knew?

None of that explained, too, what happened when the Old Man took the dosimeter without looking at it, then ordered everyone up and ready without asking a single question. Thinking about that made Mackenzie nervous. He had long thought some of the rumors about the Old Man were too crazy to be true. Now he wasn’t sure. Maybe the Old Man did have a hot line to God inside his head. Zom hordes, giant hyenas, anything seemed possible.

He squinted into the wind and thought he saw clouds on the western horizon. Rain would make the going worse, but no one was in a position to do anything about it.

The radio crackled below, up front where Freeman was driving. “Huey here,” Mackenzie heard the corporal say. The return transmission was marred by static, but Freeman replied, “Roger that, out.” A moment later, Freeman shouted, “How’re you doing up there, sir?”

“I’ll live,” Mackenzie called back sourly. “And you don’t have to keep calling me ‘sir’ when it’s just you and me around.”

“No problem with that, sir,” Freeman said. “Listen, sir, the general says we’re gonna stop after we get through some woods ahead. Can you keep from dying until then, sir?”

Mackenzie checked the map. It had to be the Cibola National Forest, which covered a topographically challenging region of low mountains and narrow valleys. He wondered how one pronounced Cibola. “The terrain ahead might be bad,” he called. “Watch for rockslides.”

“Will do, but we’re going through it anyway. The general wants to put a lot of space between us and the Whore of Babylon. His words, not mine.”

I should have killed her, Mackenzie thought. There wasn’t justification, but I knew right then she was nothing but trouble. It would have been better than going through this nightmare.

“By Landon’s people. Isn’t that why we turned north in Las Cruces, to throw them off?”

Mackenzie was positive he had not heard that correctly. He eased himself down from the hatch and moved forward to crouch just behind the driver’s seat, which had little padding but was all that was available. He managed not to do more than hiss through his teeth when he bumped his left arm on an ammo crate. “The what?” he gasped.

Freeman turned around for a moment to peer at Mackenzie through his protective driving goggles. It was impossible to say how ridiculous he looked, yet so perfectly true to form. “What?”

“Oh, right, forgot you were out for that part. The general made us stop when we came out of the pass above Las Cruces so he could use one of the dosimeters Miss Bitch had. He didn’t like the readings he got, so we went north to try to go around it.”

Mackenzie waited for more of a response but got nothing. “What radiation?” he exploded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh.” Freeman took his right hand off the steering wheel and made grand gestures as he spoke. “The general thinks the Landons knew there was some kind of fallout thing in the direction of the west coast. Maybe they sent an expedition of their own that way a while back and found out about it, but didn’t tell anyone else. The general doesn’t think there was a war, though. He said there was a big nuclear power station somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego that probably blew up in sixty-nine or seventy after everyone went Zom. Obviously there were no brothers running it, or we wouldn’t be worrying about it. Anyway, the general didn’t want to go anywhere near the coast as we didn’t have any idea what it would be like. He told us not to eat or drink anything that didn’t come out of our supplies, too. We’re still going to link up with U.S. 180 and get to Vegas by way of Flagstaff, like before, but we’ll stay out of the contaminated areas a little longer. He’s going to check the readings again when we stop for the night to see if we can keep going west or have to go around north some more.”

Freeman shrugged. “Uh . . . yeah, probably. Not much, though. Maybe.” He put his right hand back on the steering wheel. Mackenzie noticed at that moment that while Freeman had been talking, he had been manipulating the steering wheel with his knees. His left hand had been resting in his lap the whole time.

“Not much radiation,” Mackenzie repeated, trying to ignore Freeman’s driving. “You’re sure?”

Freeman gave a short, humorless laugh. “No it don’t, ‘cause we’re down to seven unwounded effectives, six wounded semi-effectives including yourself, some of whom can barely stand up, and five wounded ineffectives who can’t do shit. Everybody else is dead or way back behind us too far to care about. Radiation, hell, that’s number eleven on the list of our ten biggest problems right now. We were damn lucky anybody left knew how to drive. We got only three men who know how to operate those Lightnings in case we run into zoms, but they're gonna train some new guys. At least the Landons don’t have ‘em and we do. I hope that evil bitch gets eaten by a giant fucking mutant rattlesnake.”

That made Mackenzie burst out in laughter, which lasted only a second because laughter made his chest shake and that made his left arm explode in pain signals. He screamed.

“Your arm still hurting?” asked Freeman, giving the lieutenant a backward glance.

Freeman shook his head and sighed, his eyes back on the road. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do next time we see that girl. Lot of catching up.”

When the spasm passed and Mackenzie wasn’t seeing spots before his eyes, he sighed and looked around the cramped crew compartment. His gaze fell upon the radio. “Has anyone tried to call back and tell the folks in Austin what happened?”

“The general did,” said Freeman, scratching his chin. “He talked to the President herself on a secure line. It won’t do any good, though. There’s still a Landon in Austin who’ll screw things up for us.”

“Lieutenant, your whole problem is that you aren’t paranoid enough. I wouldn’t put it past that witch Michele to pull a coup on the ‘O.’ That was one political deal that was made in hell, getting a Landon into the Capitol.”

“Yeah, right. She can get outgunned by her V.P. like the rest of us.” Freeman’s face wrinkled up. “Man, do you smell that? It’s like something burning. Better not be us.”

The same thought occurred to Mackenzie at the same moment. The air suddenly had the thick odor of a wood fire. He then thought of the smoke he had seen minutes earlier to the west ahead of them. Cursing profusely, he jumped up and climbed back into the turret, then struggled to lift a pair of binoculars to his eyes with one hand. It took several minutes of observation to confirm his fears.

“Forest fire!” he shouted to Freeman. “It’s west-by-northwest of us, maybe five miles off!”

As Freeman radioed in the news, Mackenzie studied the fire and checked it against his map and the compass he carried. He could not see any flames yet, but the source of the smoke was clear: it was rising from the old national forest, only a short distance ahead. The map indicated they would drive through a river valley that cut through the rolling terrain of the woods, but it was impossible to tell yet if they would accidentally drive into the fire itself.

He would, thought Mackenzie. It wasn’t like there were lots of other options. The brown and gray haze to the west thickened as he watched.

There was little else to do except tie cloths over their noses and mouths to keep out the falling ash as they got closer. At the start of the foothills, Mackenzie saw a decayed sign announcing that they were entering Datil, New Mexico. He saw no sign of any buildings through the overgrowth, though some of the local streets still existed among the pines. Freeman shifted gears as the Saladin began climbing a long grade. Curtains of dark smoke descended around them until it was difficult to see the next truck behind them even with its headlights on.

The journey through the forested hills took only an hour by anyone’s watch. To Mackenzie it was a lifetime. Every cough was agony, jarring his injured arm. They never saw the fire itself, which was apparently north of the road behind mountainous terrain. Spruces and firs surrounded them as they entered a long, winding canyon with eroded cliffs and jagged mountains on all sides. Wildlife became visible whenever the smoke thinned. Animals had gathered along the banks of the river to the right: pronghorn antelopes, a forlorn black bear, small herds of deer.

One of the deer was entirely white, an albino. Mackenzie stared at it, wondering if it was a fallout-created mutant. Albinism was a fairly common genetic error. Most other errors would have prevented a creature from reaching adulthood. He looked back at the truck behind him to see if anyone had noticed, then turned to the albino deer again.

It was gone. Startled, Mackenzie looked up and down the river but saw nothing of it. Perhaps the deer had run off—but why didn’t the rest of the deer run, too? Perhaps it had been a trick of the smoke.

The convoy drove on. The canyon walls got lower. The smoke and haze were soon behind them, not in front of them. The rugged hills and mountains became relatively scrubland again, the landscape dotted with low trees. They continued heading west toward the blinding sun as it approached the horizon.

Thank you, God, Mackenzie thought, limp with relief. He remembered then that he had been concerned about rock slides, but had forgotten all about them. After seeing that the terrain was not going to change anytime soon, he climbed down and took his seat by Freeman again.

“We made it!” shouted Freeman. They slapped hands until Mackenzie realized Freeman was driving with his knees again and made him stop that. They settled back and made small talk, waiting for the Old Man to call for the convoy to pull over. That call came about half an hour later, before the red sun went down. The convoy slowed, then one by one, starting with the Saladin, the vehicles pulled over and their engines rumbled into silence. They were at an old intersection with a road heading to the north. A dense clump of pines lay a short distance to the northwest.

Mackenzie pulled himself out of the Saladin’s turret, banging his wounded arm four times in doing so. He thought he would pass out after the fourth time, but he managed to recover and push himself off the armored car to land on his feet. The impact brought a shock of pain that left him staggering, trying not to fall down. He accidentally backed into an unreadable old road sign that knocked the wind out of his lungs. He sank to the ground, legs out in front of him, gasping for air.

“Better get up before the general sees you,” Freeman called, jumping down from the Saladin. “You can sit around on your ass later.”

Mackenzie made every effort to tell Freeman what he thought of that idea, but it was impossible to speak. After the dizziness passed, he got up and stumbled back to the Saladin, leaning on it for support. As he rubbed his face, he heard someone walk up and stop in front of him.

Mackenzie jumped in fright and stood away from the vehicle, straightening up as best he could. “Shit! I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know—”

“At ease, forget it,” said the Old Man with a rare smile. “I’ve known that corporal longer than you have. How’re you holding up?”

Mackenzie caught his breath again and leaned against the Saladin again. “I guess I can’t complain too much, sir,” he said. “Least I’m alive.”

“We have nine dead,” said the Old Man. “We lost two more on the way here, Stewart and Zeddemore. The rest of us should make it. Did the corporal talk to you about what’s been going on?”

“Uh, yeah, he did, sir. He said there was radiation around, but he didn’t—”

“Here.” The Old Man pulled a yellow penlike object from his shirt pocket. “Should be enough light to use it,” he said, handing it over. “Take a reading.”

Mackenzie took the dosimeter and raised it to his right eye. He turned to aim it near the setting sun for the best light. “It says… thirty… six milliroentgens.” He hesitated, then added, “That should be per hour.”

“Way over background normal,” said the Old Man. “I think the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station melted down on the coast west of here, probably during the Zom. I’ve been wondering why we never got any transmissions from Southern California before now. Everyone like us probably died of radiation sickness or cancer, later on. Every zom in that area must be radioactive as hell. Millions and millions of them. And we thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

“Mother of God.” Mackenzie handed the dosimeter back in shock. A thought struck him, something Freeman had said earlier. “Freeman said something about there being more than one dosimeter.”

“Yes, indeed. Miss Landon left us an array of equipment designed to detect, measure, and defend oneself against radiation.” The Old Man pulled another dosimeter like the first one from his pocket and gave it to Mackenzie. “Try this one.”

Mackenzie peered into it. “Looks like the first one,” he said, “but I’m not getting the same—what the hell. This one’s calibrated in full roentgens. Tens of roentgens.”

“That dosimeter was used only by people working directly with bomb-grade material, probably plutonium,” said the Old Man. “It’s no good for detecting fallout, unless you’re standing right at ground zero one minute after.”

Mackenzie handed over the dosimeter, the message sinking in. “They were hunting for bombs.”

“That was Andrew’s pet project,” said the Old Man with a grim look. “I didn’t object to it, President’s orders, but I wasn’t in favor of it, either. The state the world’s in right now, we don’t need a nuclear arsenal. Too many of us dead already. Zoms we can handle.”

The general shrugged. “President’s orders, as I said. Ours is not to reason why. I trust she’s got a good reason for it. She might want to get a good idea of what’s lying around for others to pick up. That would make sense. It’s not my place to do her thinking for her.”

“I don’t think Andrew did. Too much of a math nerd to care about raw power.” The Old Man raised an eyebrow at Mackenzie. “We might not be able to go home even if we could.”

Hearing it from the Old Man was infinitely worse than hearing it from Freeman. “Michele Landon.”

“We lost contact with the Capitol an hour ago. Try not to talk about it with the men, though everyone probably already knows. We can’t raise anyone.”

“We’ve got thirteen people left who can walk or pick up a weapon, and three who can shoot as long as they’re lying down. We’re not beaten yet, soldier.”

“I can’t believe this.” Mackenzie dropped his hands and looked up. “What about Daria, that girl?”

“I changed my mind about you not contacting her before now. Come by the rear trailer when you’re up to it. I’ve got a file for you on her, everything she’s talked about. Read the file first, then see me and give her a call tomorrow. Let her know we’re coming, but don’t tell her how we’re getting there or from which direction.”

“I don’t want anyone else who happens to be listening in to get the jump on us. All she needs to know is that we’re coming. Read the file, then we’ll talk, then you call her.”

“Uh, we hit one way back, but that was a couple days ago.” Mackenzie thought about it. “That’s weird, but no, sir, I haven’t. I didn’t think about that till you mentioned it.”

“I can understand what happened to the ones in Roswell, but…” The Old Man rubbed his mouth. “I don’t like this. I think I’d have been happier if we’d shot a few dozen of them by now. I haven’t seen a one.”

The two men stared at each other. “That doesn’t make sense,” said Mackenzie. “Maybe all the ones in this area died. Maybe the radiation killed ‘em.”

The Old Man clapped a gentle hand on Mackenzie’s right shoulder. “We’re not down yet,” he said. “Long as one of us can drive and shoot, we’re not out of the game.”

The Old Man started walking back to the rear of the convoy. “And if you see that corporal,” he said as he left, “tell him to fuck off.”

God damn it, he would say that, Mackenzie thought, favoring his left arm but unable to keep from laughing.

After the vehicles were secured, some of the men explored the area. Mackenzie went with them, being now the only other officer in the convoy. Among the cluster of pines by the road junction they found the scattered remains of a few houses and old cars. Mackenzie knelt and brushed the dust off a fallen, hand-painted metal sign.

A town called Omega? “That,” he said under his breath, “is messed up.” He got up after a moment, walked back to the Saladin, and set up guard-duty shifts for the night. He gave himself the two a.m. to four a.m. shift, which was always the hardest. Some of the men were early risers and could handle things from four a.m. onward.

He walked back to the rear tractor-trailer while everyone was eating their canned dinner, got the file from the Old Man, and stopped to see the three men who had been most seriously wounded. One of them was the old master sergeant, Lucas.

“We’re in the shit now,” Lucas said with a weak smile when he saw Mackenzie walking up. “Next in line after the Old Man is a lieutenant. We’re goners for sure.”

“How’re you doing?” Mackenzie said, kneeling by Lucas’s side on the ground.

“Not bad, sir, not bad,” said Lucas. He looked down at his chest, wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. “My first wife shot me back in ‘sixty-eight, that was worse.”

“Yeah, she said she was tired of me being right all the time. Least I didn’t get hit in a lung.”

“Nah, I got some right here. Thanks.” Lucas looked at the canteens on the ground beside him, then turned his head back to Mackenzie. “That damn Freeman still alive?”

“Good. Tell him the general and I are promotin’ him. He’s gonna make sergeant when we get back, and I don’t want to hear any shit out of him about it. That man’s gonna do some real work after this.”

“The general and I might make you captain before this trip’s over. Can’t have a lieutenant running things, God knows. No offense of course, sir.”

That made the master sergeant laugh. “You’re a good man, sir. Kyle was right to pick you to come with us.” Lucas coughed at that point, then waved Mackenzie goodbye, unable to speak.

Kyle was right to pick you? General Armalin had picked him, Mackenzie, to go on the expedition? That wasn’t what the Old Man had said. I put out the call, some desk jockey in Austin thought you might have it in you to make the trip, and bam, you’re here. That implied it had been an impersonal selection. Which was true? Did it matter?

Mackenzie shrugged it off. He had other things to worry about. The issue passed from his mind.

An hour later he fell into a fitful sleep beside the Saladin, fully dressed and with his weapons lying next to him. He was awakened from a disturbing dream, the details of which he could not later recall, when one of the midnight-to-two guards walked up and nudged his left boot. “Two o’clock, sir.”

“Okay.” He winced and groaned as he moved his left arm, then slowly got to his feet. After posting the other men, he walked out to the other side of the pines carrying an empty supply crate in his right hand. He dropped it on the ground, went back and got his weapons bag, then returned to the crate and sat down. He laid everything out so he could get to it the moment he noticed trouble: Thompson submachine gun by the crate, .357 in back holster, sawed-off shotgun (a fine gift it was) between his legs, machete sheathed over his shoulder. Machetes were great against zoms, who always reached out at victims and left themselves open to having arms and then heads sliced off. The moon was up, a few days past full. Crickets chirped. He found the sound comforting. Life clung to the land, radiation or no.

He had a canteen full of cold coffee, but he tried to stay awake without it. He’d never get back to sleep if he drank even a sip. He began to hum songs he remembered from Buxton Ridge. He wondered what Daria was like, if it was a trap anyway, what the secret was to the Zom. He’d had no time to go through the file before sleeping and did not want to read it on guard duty and miss something important that was creeping in.

When he realized he was yawning despite his best efforts, he reached for the canteen beside him. His fingers brushed against fur and muscle instead.

He did not move or breathe for several seconds. The growl ended. With infinite care, he turned his head slightly to the right.

It was a mountain lion. He had never seen one before except in book pictures. The huge cat sniffed his canteen, licked it once, then looked up into Mackenzie’s face with enormous green eyes that glowed in the moonlight.

Mackenzie stared back, motionless. He was intensely aware of the warmth of the cougar’s breath on his face, the studied way it looked into his eyes as if judging him, considering what to do with him and when. Mackenzie’s shotgun was two feet from his hand. That was two feet too far. He elected to wait. If the cougar looked for a moment as if it would spring, he would go for it, but not before. He might get off one double-barreled shot. It might be all he needed. For now, he could wait.

The mountain lion snorted and looked away. It relaxed, no longer interested in the human, and briefly surveyed the scrubland around them. It then turned to stare at Mackenzie again but seemed bored. It yawned, sat down one foot away from Mackenzie and licked its nose, then began to wash itself with one paw like a housecat.

Mackenzie forgot about grabbing a weapon. He watched the beast in the moonlight, unaware if he was even breathing. It was strangely beautiful. He felt there was something right about it, something good, and even if it might kill him it was still worthy of life. He made himself relax as best he could. Any other option had unacceptable drawbacks.

How long they sat together in the night, Mackenzie didn’t know. At some point he blinked or became forgetful for a moment, lost in the spell, and the mountain lion was gone. He froze in terror, then slowly looked around. Nothing. He stood up and looked again, everywhere. The creature had vanished utterly.

Coffee forgotten, he stayed where he was and kept looking for the cougar, turning in place and holding his shotgun, until another soldier walked out and relieved him. He collected his weapons and staggered back to the Saladin. Nothing was out of place. Everyone was asleep but the changing guards. He put his weapons bag down by the armored car, took out the shotgun, made sure it was loaded, and leaned against the vehicle. He was hardly aware of the pain from his cramped left arm. He stayed awake and standing until dawn came and everyone got up.

That was when they found the bodies of the two dead soldiers, which had been placed among the pines behind Mackenzie for later burial, were gone without a trace. The discovery caused a brief panic and everyone threw their gear into the trucks and left the former hamlet of Omega at once. The Old Man looked at Mackenzie for a long silent moment before they went, then shook his head and walked back to his truck.

There must have been more than one. Mackenzie knew this in his bones. One had made sure the live human did nothing to interrupt things while the others, at least one but possibly two, carried the bodies away. How they knew to do this he couldn’t say, but they had done it, it had been deliberate, and they had been perfectly at ease with it.

How many generations of animals had come and gone since the Zom? How many species had mutated after breathing and ingesting the fallout from the west? What else waited for them in the miles to come?

“I slept good last night,” said Freeman from the driver’s seat, putting the Saladin into gear. “How about you, sir?”

Mackenzie spent the day after leaving Omega, New Mexico, reading the contents of the manila folder the Old Man had given him. There were brief interruptions to his study: a convoy stop at Springerville that spawned an argument over directions between Freeman and the Old Man; a tire explosion on the tanker along U.S. 180 north of Springerville, quickly repaired; the discovery and immediate annihilation of two crippled zoms while passing through St. Johns; then a long and tedious series of stops along the scrub desert of U.S. 180 between St. Johns and Holbrook, where the convoy hoped to continue on straight west to Las Vegas. The latter stops were made to check the load-worthy condition of decaying concrete bridges crossing gullies, ravines, and canyons. “God damn Little Colorado tributaries!” Mackenzie once heard Freeman yell while waiting for the one remaining combat engineer to complete his assessment. Mackenzie didn’t bother to leave the Saladin after he stuck his head out of the main hatch at the Springerville stop and the Old Man stopped arguing with Freeman long enough to glare daggers at him.

Between those interruptions, as his left arm throbbed and a warm dry breeze blew over him from the driver’s viewport, Mackenzie found himself falling into a different world. A few pages of typed commentary were appended to the main body of paper-clipped text, which was a carbon-copy transcription of what Daria, whoever she was, had been transmitting from California. (Who else has read this? Mackenzie wondered.) A single map showing her presumed location was also included. As Mackenzie peered at the map, his eyebrows went up. Daria lived in a place of legend, a land unseen by survivors of the Zom for decades: the notorious Death Valley.

Her earliest transmissions were received August 7, when an amateur radio operator in San Antonio noticed a faint Morse code signal while monitoring 500 kHz. That frequency had been established almost a century earlier as the emergency band for ships at sea to radio for help. During the Zom, the frequency was used by survivors for only a brief period before electric power was lost in most communities across the world. As power stations were repaired or rebuilt and battery manufacturing increased, more amateur radio operators began broadcasting, and the emergency frequency again came into use.

The only message Daria transmitted at first was a standard SOS, sent at random times during the day. The number of mistakes made in such a simple message led the San Antonio man to believe the sender was a novice. Unable to locate the source of the signal, he sent a letter to the local Army headquarters, which forwarded the information to Austin. Texan authorities, however, couldn’t find the signal. The sender was broadcasting at such a low power almost no one could hear it. The San Antonio operator’s short-wave antenna set-up was quickly determined to be far more sensitive than anything the Army or any private firm was using, so the Army hired the operator as a civilian contractor to set up another receiver at Fort Worth. Triangulation was then used to locate the sender once and for all.

It turned out the sender was in southern California or southern Nevada. The news came as a shock because no radio messages had been received from that far west in decades. Nearly all North American survivors of the Zom lived east of the Mississippi River, with the exception of Texas. The sender’s sex and name were by this time known, as Daria was starting to describe herself and her daily activities. A typical unedited transmission from that early period, with dashes added by the Army when she paused for longer than usual, read like so:

8/12/99 – 17:02 TX: SJS DASIA LOS SOS – MX – MY – MY – NIME IS B – DARIA – TSE OUICK BSOUN FOY JUMPS OUER TH LAQY DJG – SOCKY RA – RACOON – RAC – COON – CHCKED INEO HIS ROGM – ROOM ONLY EO FINB I SATE THAT DAM SONG

For some reason Daria often quoted lyrics from old Beatles tunes, particularly from the White Album. She was obviously teaching herself Morse code as she transmitted daily at midmorning and in the evening. Her transmission errors were usually mis-keyings of similarly coded Morse code letters—exchanging E (dot) and T (dash), for example, or X and Y, as the former is dash-dot-dot-dash and the latter is dash-dot-dash-dash. Letting her finger linger a moment too long on the key, or not long enough, was sufficient to turn any word into nonsense.

She did not, however, respond to any transmissions sent back to her on the same frequency. She was capable of sending but was either ignoring or not receiving replies. Perhaps her radio was damaged, one writer thought. She likely didn’t know how to use her radio properly, wrote another. She might want only to talk, said a third. Nothing could be done until she decided or discovered how to have a two-way conversation. The Texas Army signal corps monitored her messages as the ionosphere permitted, second-guessing and correcting her apparent spelling errors in official reports. She continued to improve her keying.

8/18/99 – 09:37 TX: SOS DARIA SOS – HELLO AGAN TO W(H)O EVER IS LIST – (L)ISTENIN(G) PRO(B) – ABLY NO ONE (B)UT (W)HO CARES – SAME CRAP DIF – DIF – FER – EN(T) DAY – NOT MU(C)H NEWS – BOMB [comb?] BROKE IN M(Y) HAIR DAM IT – TALL WEE(D) SOUP IS (G)OOD DID NOT GEE [get?] SIK SICK– I GOT SUN(B)URN YES(T)ER(D)A(Y) – RED ALL O(V)ER M(E) – YES – TER – DAY LOOKI(N)G [unclear] AND P A L M DATS – I AM NOT A OUT DOOR PERSON TOO DAM SMALL TOO DAM PALE

She then apparently considered the implications of what she had just transmitted.

8/18/99 – 09:59 TX: I A – I AM A WHI – WHI TEY NO(T) A PIGGY – I KNOW (B)AD THING S HAPPNED B(U)T [unclear] STOP IT – I AM NOT A PIG(G)Y – THERE ARE WH WHITEYS IN DEATH VALLY LIKE ME WHO ARE NO(T) PIGGYS – THEY AR THE FAMILY – [unclear] ALMOST A HUN(D)RED – I HAT – E THEM I HATE TH(E)M – THEY [unclear] HEL TER S – SKEL TER – RAN A(W)AY (B)EFORE SPRING – I WONT GO BACK – I WANE TO STOP [unclear] SKT SKEL TER IF [signal lost]

8/18/99 – 10:32 TX: B – H – HERE A(G)AN MORE NEW – S – CHA C H A R L I E C H A R L IE CHA RL IE IS THE [unclear] OF THE FAMIL(Y) – HE (D)OES NOT MAKE SEN(S)E – HE (W)ON T ANS (W)ER (Q) U E S T I O N – S – HE SAYS (W)OMEN ART [unclear] THAN DOGS AND TO(L)D M(E) TO EAT (L)AST (B)E CAUSE I ASKD WH(Y) HE SA(Y)S HE IS (B)ETTER THAN ANY ONE ELSE – HE SA(Y)S HE START – HE AND L O N G [unclear] MADE HEL TER S(K)EL TE(R) (B)E CAUSE THE FAMILY [unclear] OVER THE [unclear] – HELIN MOM SAID CHA RL IE IS OUR GOD AND I HAD TO DO E(V)ERY THING HE TOLD ME BUT I SAID I (W)ILL NOT OBE(Y) CHA(R)LIE E(V)EN IF HE AND LONG LONNY [?] AR(E) GOD – I R E F U S T REF REFU(S)E TO BE [unclear] FA(M)ILY – I (W)ILL NEVE(R) GO BA(C)K

8/18/99 – 10:52 TX: I HA(V)E A (R)ADIO – RADIO – I LISTEN TO [unclear] FROM FOR F O R T R ES(S) DETRO(I)T AND NEWS FROM AUSTEN WHEN THE B A TT E (R) – Y S [unclear] DIE – IT IS HARD TO FIN(D) DETR O I T IN [unclear] AT NIGHT – I (L)IKE THE TEN O(C)LO(C)K NEWS – FROM AUSTEN BEFORE BED ESP(E)CIA(L)LY CAPIT – CAPITOL BU(ZZ)

8/18/99 – 11:30 TX: [fade in] I DO ING THIS – NO O(N)E HEARS ME – I WISH C R O [unclear] WITH ME AND NOT D(E)AD – MAY AS WEL(L) [unclear] – HELEN MOM SAI(D) A LOT OF PE(O)PLE DIE(D) WHEN CHARLIE (B)EGAN HEL TER SN – SKEL TER – SHE SAID THAT WAS (G)OOD BUT NOT SAY (W)HY BLA(C)KES [unclear] – SHE DOS EVER Y THIN(G) CHAR – CHAR(L)IE TELLS HER LIKE A DOG – I DO NOT WA(N)T TO GO BACK TO TH FAMI LY IF (CH)ARLIE IS THERE NOT VEN IF LO(N)G LONN(Y) [unclear] ME – CHARLIE SAD HE W O U L D HE WOU L D MAKE THE (D)OGS EAT ME IF I DID N(O)T SH(U)T UP – I (W)ISH I HAD KILLD HIM NOT C R O W NOT THE DOG(S) – I WISH THE(Y) SAW HIM DEAD AND I HAD KILLED HIM – THAT WO(U)LD GIVE [unclear] LOT TO THINK A(B)OUT IF I PRO(V)ED CHARLI WAS N(O)T GOD

The flood gates opened. From that time on, Daria began broadcasting at all hours, even late at night when she couldn’t sleep. It was as if she could not say enough about her rage at Charlie, Helen Mom, and an assortment of other characters from “the family.” It was strange, Mackenzie thought, that she always used the term the family, but never my family. He also found himself thinking of the “family” with a capital letter, as Daria attributed so much authority to it.

These revelations caused the Army to declare the listening project a military secret. Because of Daria’s low broadcasting power, it was easy to keep the transmissions out of the media light. The news that a white person existed who was capable of reason was deemed too unsettling to release to the general public. President Winfrey agreed but insisted the Army go out, find Daria (whoever or whatever she was), and bring her back to Texas. The event Daria called Helter Skelter (oddly, the name of another Beatles tune from the White Album) sounded increasingly like the Zom. Her claim that she knew something about the cause of civilization’s worst cataclysm was gravely disturbing, however improbable it seemed.

In the midst of her rants about her former life, all the people she hated most and why, Daria began to relate the pieces of a larger story, that of how she had escaped the Family. In the shadowed interior of the armored car, Mackenzie saw it happen in his mind’s unblinking eye.

It was obvious Daria hated every aspect of her life with the Family, a large and isolated clan that inhabited several buildings deep in a mountain wilderness by a freshwater spring. She was the lowest-ranking Family member, picked on and pushed around with impunity even by smaller children. Daily she was made to do “the slaves work,” a comment that implied there were people around who were not considered part of the Family. Daria’s problems were, in part, of her own making. Adults in the Family, particularly “Helen Mom” and the older men, were angered by her constant questioning of authority. She was beaten and starved (or worse) on a regular basis. Her peers were equally contemptuous of her intelligence and reading skills. Whenever she was found with a book, the other youths took it away and forced her to watch as they burned it. This treatment only made her more secretive and determined to read.

The Family’s leader was a bearded holy man named Charlie, whom Daria despised though she said he was revered by everyone else as a living deity, a miracle worker. Charlie had a companion or assistant named Long Lonny, about whom Daria said little. Only Charlie was allowed to talk with Long, she reported, and he had helped Charlie bring about “Helter Skelter.” Daria’s nickname among the Family was “Little Blind Piggy,” a title given her by Charlie because she could not see any object in focus until it was inches from her face. (“Myopia?” someone wrote on the transcript.) She sometimes found old glasses that helped her read, but other kids stole and destroyed these, too.

“Piggy” was clearly a term of ridicule, but Daria made no mention of having a weight problem. On the contrary, she described herself as small for her age, skinny and weak. She often repeated she was a “whitey” but not a “piggy,” as if the terms were somehow connected. Daria had no allies in the Family except for an enigmatic being named Crow with whom she often talked, and the Family’s dogs, whom she fed and petted. Mackenzie, who as a child had seen trained ravens mimic human speech, thought it obvious that Crow was Daria’s pet.

For weeks before she fled the Family, on the pretext of doing outdoor chores, Daria secretly cached food, water, and other items by an old road leading northward, deeper into the mountains. At the road’s end, she had heard, was an oasis of water and life. Where she had learned about the road and where it led was a mystery, but she had memorized the route in detail. On a moonless night just before the winter rains ended, she became aware that a dreadful thing was about to happen to Crow. (The Family probably wanted to cook him, Mackenzie thought, though Daria’s reaction to the news seemed rather extreme.) Unable to tolerate living with the Family any longer, she made a break for freedom. She planted misleading evidence that she had gone west along a canyon road toward one of the old cities to find more books, having heard from the adults about libraries. The Family had long known of this dream but did not take it seriously. Mack, who loved dogs, was stunned to read that she then poisoned The Family’s pet canines to prevent them from tracking her, a deed that she looked back upon with horror, grief, and regret. At some point that night she also caused Crow’s death, though she did not say how. She viewed the act as unavoidable to prevent him from being hurt. The lone exception to her searing guilt for these killings was the slaying of a dog she disliked with great intensity because it had often tried to “get” her. This animal she killed first.

Her escape story was the only time she described in detail the region in which the Family lived. Once the dogs had been dealt with, she used a battery-powered light to guide her way along the trail heading north, walking at a swift steady pace to conserve her strength. She paused only to retrieve items from her caches. Her overland journey was aided by an old pair of boots she had hidden away for this occasion. The largest item she took was a heavy backpack containing spring water, which she drank through a straw or tube. The trail paralleled a creek bed up through a winding canyon. She made it to a mountain pass before dawn, no pursuit visible behind her, then followed the old trail down into a long, narrow valley at a quick pace. She fell several times, once losing half of her supply of water and another time breaking the battery-powered light.

Dawn found her walking northward past a “huge striped rock” that she could tell was striped even from a distance with her bad eyesight. It began to rain, but she kept moving except to replenish her water supply at a creek. She followed the descending trail to her right around several peaks, then reached another narrow canyon road at nightfall. Here she stopped to clean dried blood from her skin and hair. (Her blood or someone else’s, she did not say.) Soaked and exhausted, she fell asleep, only to be tormented by nightmares.

She awoke after dawn, fearful she had been found, but she was still alone. Gathering her supplies, she continued through the canyon to the east until she came to a fork in the trail. She had been advised to head north, along the left fork, but she was tiring quickly. At last she decided to take the right fork of the trail downward along a rushing creek. After several rest stops in the afternoon, one near an abandoned building over a natural spring, she exited the canyon and found herself confronted with a great desert valley, its dunes stretching to the north and south. All trails vanished, covered with windblown sand. She had reached, she wrote with a misspelling, “the vally of death.”

Once more she camped out, but animal cries during the night kept her from sleep. Before dawn she began moving again, the sun at her back, walking northward along the dune ridges. The day was hot, and walking over sand was difficult. She found that distant things looked much closer than they actually were, for reasons she couldn’t guess, and she became frustrated with her progress. The terrain changed from eroded cliffs to sand dunes to rocky wasteland to flat salt pans. Dry creek beds were everywhere. She finally stopped at a shallow, bitter-tasting stream to bathe and get her bearings. The heat was making her confused. She elected to head toward the canyon wall on her right, to the east, and by late afternoon had reached the cliff bottom. There she found the remains of a highway barely visible through the dust and debris. Exhausted, she camped again and fell asleep at once.

Deep in the night, she awoke feeling dizzy and lethargic. She checked her belongs and found several small items had disappeared without a trace. Fearing the worst, she packed up to leave—and discovered her water-filled backpack had been chewed open. No fresh water was left. As soon as it was light enough to see, she left the area, still heading north. It was then she noticed blood running down one arm. She was injured but could not tell where or how. Frightened, she picked up the pace to reach the oasis as soon as she could.

The day proved to be the worst so far. She did not remember much of her journey. The lack of water and her exhausted state addled her consciousness. The way north became infinite. No matter how long she walked, the terrain never changed and nothing in the distance got closer. She thought she saw someone she called the Red Queen waiting for her on the road ahead, always drifting out of reach. Then she saw Crow walking with her, and the Family’s dogs ran by her and disappeared into a great blue lake to her left, close by in the desert. She ran toward the lake to take a drink.

She regained consciousness at twilight. She lay on her face in the dust and rocks some distance from the road. Most of her small carried items were gone. She was feverish, weak, and bleeding from a dozen cuts in places where her face, arms, and legs were exposed. Half mad, she abandoned the rest of her possessions and began staggering north as night fell. A crescent moon illuminated her way. She found the road and made herself keep moving.

The next thing she remembered was coughing and choking, thrashing about in cool water. She had fallen into a shallow freshwater pond. She made it to shore, collapsed, and was asleep in seconds. When the bright sun came up, she found she had reached the oasis. It still took days to recover from her fever. When it ended, she thought she looked like a skeleton with skin pulled over it. She ate handfuls of grass, leaves, anything she could find. She lived.

Around her was a small island of living green beyond which was the driest wasteland imaginable. Pine trees, palms, strange birds, colorful flowers, exotic grasses, and decaying ruins were everywhere. She named the unlikely oasis Obladi Oblada, after a childhood song she liked (Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on). Cartographers who read Daria’s transcript and plotted out her position had a different name for her paradise: Furnace Creek. It had been a resort hotel, garden, and golf complex built near Travertine Springs, which watered the tiny refuge of life. A highway ran west to the oasis from Las Vegas. Finding Daria would be a snap.

Most of the remainder of Daria’s transmissions detailed how she had turned the ruined buildings among the greenery into a home. She began to experiment with a battery-powered radio transmitter she found, which she was now using. Whoever had told her about the way to her oasis had also advised her on how to call for help from the outside world. She had trouble believing it would work, but she kept at it. On August 30, while playing with the radio, she realized she had been listening for a response without flipping a switch that turned on the loudspeakers. She could now hear transmissions as well as receive them. She was mortified that this detail had escaped her for so long, but gamely continued to send news from her hidden green haven.

Mackenzie had only one page of the manuscript left to read. He still had no idea what he would tell Daria. He knew Morse code well enough from his schooling, but to contact Daria he would have to use the upgraded radio in the tractor trailer with the tank destroyer. No problem there.

The transmissions came less often as August wound to a close. She sounded as if she were growing tired of writing. The entries from August 31 onward, when the convoy left on its cross-country journey, were made in pencil and had not been carbon-copied. Mackenzie realized probably no one but he, the Old Man, and the radioman transcribing the signals knew this last part.

He flipped a page and began reading Daria’s last few messages. The time of the last transmission was an hour and a half before the convoy pulled over to camp at Omega, New Mexico, the day before.

9/1/99 – 08:53 TX: THIS MORNIMG I FOUND A GLASSS THAT ALNOST FIT ON MY HTAD. I CAN SEE JOTS OF THINGS SHMRP FAR AWAY – SO STRANG TO SEEE – I WILL UALK AROUND AND LOOK

9/1/99 – 10:22 TX: GLASES MADE MZ HEAD HURT BUT I CAN STE EVRYTHING – GOIND OUTSIDE

9/1/99 – 12:56 TX: O B L A DI IS BEUTIFUL – IT IS – PARA DIS

9/1/99 – 17:13 TX: SOS SOSOS OSO SOS LONG IS ON THE GRISS HE FOLLOWD ME HTRE LONG IS ON THE GRASS LONGLONNZISHERE SOS HELTRSKELTER HE FOJJOWD ME LONGLONNY IS HELTER SKELTER HELP ME HE ISHELTERSKELTER HE IS HEL

U.S. 180 south of Holbrook to Interstate 40 at Kingman
Former state of Arizona
Thursday evening, September 2, to Friday after midnight, September 3, 1999

In mid-afternoon, the convoy came to a halt a few miles southeast of a desert town called Holbrook. This time the combat engineer’s opinion was not needed regarding the safety of the U.S. 180 bridge crossing the Little Colorado River, because there was no U.S. 180 bridge crossing the Little Colorado River.

“Fuck a goddamn duck,” said Freeman, looking straight down into the canyon at the road’s end. Mackenzie stood beside him, staring at the crumbled concrete and asphalt debris far below. There was no telling what caused the span to collapse, but judging from the degree to which the rubble was overgrown with shrubs and trees, it had occurred decades before. Both men then looked to the north, where a second old bridge crossed the canyon a few hundred feet away.

“I don’t remember seeing a road over there,” said Mackenzie, who had taken so many pain pills for his injured arm he was having trouble remembering much of anything.

“That used to be part of Route 66,” said Freeman, pointing. “They built it in the ‘twenties. It ran from Chicago down to Los Angeles, got real famous, even had a TV show about it before it was replaced by other roads. Highway 180 cut a little farther south when they re-did 66 as 180, and that little bit of 66 with the original bridge was abandoned. I saw the turnoff about a mile back. Hey, why’re you looking at me like that? It’s the truth, man! It was all in that old travel guide you said someone gave you in Highland. Didn’t you read it?”

Rolling his eyes, Mackenzie walked back to the convoy to give the Old Man the news. Freeman was directed to take the Saladin and drive the engineer to the bridge north of them while everyone else rested. The Old Man walked up and down the convoy, passing out one pill to each surviving soldier while they waited. Freeman and the engineer got theirs before they left.

“Potassium iodide,” the Old Man said to Mackenzie, dropping a pill into his free hand. “Take it with water.”

Mackenzie tossed the pill in his mouth and felt for his canteen with a grimace. The dissolving tablet had a bitter taste. “Is there much radiation around, sir?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“More than I expected.” The general swallowed his pill dry, made a face, then surveyed the trucks. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Austin radio’s on the air again. President Winfrey survived Michele Landon’s coup attempt back in Austin.”

Mackenzie choked on his canteen water. The general waited until he recovered to continue. “Only a couple of Army guard units mutinied. Both were neutralized by loyalists with extreme prejudice. The Army’s now raiding every Landon Armaments facility in Texas, taking control of them. Winfrey nationalized the whole thing, made it part of the Defense Department. Abilene’s putting up a fight, but the smart Landon people switched sides or surrendered.”

“The radio says Michele and some of her bodyguards got away on a cargo plane, flying west. There’s a bounty on her, Andrew, and Jodie for a million dollars each.”

“I think she’s going to pick up her husband and daughter at White Sands, if they’re still alive. Where they’ll go after that, I have no idea.” The Old Man looked at the flatbed trailer with the Landon Lightnings mounted on it. “They can come our way if they want. I’d love to try those things out.”

“That was it, Michele got away. Could be a hundred dead in the capital. Some senators got killed in the crossfire, including one I actually voted for. Bastards.”

Mackenzie remembered something. “I talked to a diplomat from Zimbabwe the night before we left Highland, sir,” he said. “He made some remark to me about having good luck at White Sands.”

The Old Man nodded. “Among other things like nuclear weapons, Andrew Landon was supposed to be hunting for missile parts and plans. Obviously good for military use, but it would come in handy later for a space program, too. We were going to share what we found with Cape Town in exchange for uranium, for use in future power plants or… whatever.”

“I still think he was being played by his wife and daughter. I’ve known Andrew a long time. He’s a lot of things, but not a traitor.” The general looked north toward the still-standing bridge.

On impulse, Mackenzie said something he had wanted to say for days now. “Did you read his mind?”

The Old Man continued looking at the other bridge, watching the engineer’s progress in studying the structure’s supports. “I knew you were going to say that,” he said in calm monotone.

The remark almost made Mackenzie laugh, but the urge died quickly. He began to think he had overstepped his bounds.

“You did,” said the Old Man, still looking at the other bridge. “I’m okay with it this time, though. I have a gift, but I have no idea where it came from. I get a general idea of what someone is thinking, just a surface thing, when they’re standing close to me. It’s hard to explain. Sometimes when I touch objects I can tell something about the last few people who held the object, especially if they used it often. You and Freeman muddied up the reading on the dosimeter, but Jodie’s part still came through loud and clear.”

Mackenzie suddenly had nothing to say, nothing that he dared even think. He needed to get out of there and—

“Before you go,” said the Old Man, turning to face the lieutenant, “do you have any questions about the file I gave you?”

It took a moment for Mackenzie to get himself sorted out. “Yes, sir,” he said in a shaky voice. “Has Daria sent any messages since last night?”

“Not a thing. I thought it was best you read that for yourself. I don’t know what happened there with that Long Lonny guy.”

“I can’t predict the future, and I can’t see what people are doing out of my sight. Lots of things I can't do. As I said, we’ll have to go there and see for ourselves.”

The general turned away to watch Freeman and the engineer. “By the way,” he added, “there’s an old Interstate highway running westward through Holbrook, I-40. If it’s in good shape, we could make it to Kingman by tomorrow night. We’ll decide which route to take into Vegas from there. Oh, and lieutenant—we still haven’t seen more than three zoms this whole week. I’d be happier if we’d shot a few thousand of them by now. They can’t all have gone east.”

The engineer cleared the older bridge for use, but with deep reservations. The convoy was carefully driven across, one truck at a time and one soldier—a volunteer driver—per truck. As the last tractor-trailer went across with the tank destroyer on it, Mackenzie saw the middle of the bridge begin to sag. He waved his good arm and screamed for the driver to gun the engine. The bridge fell into the canyon with a roar as the last wheels on the trailer made it safely to the other side. Everyone ran over to stand at the ledge where the bridge had vanished, gave its fallen ruins a long last look before walking back to their vehicles, shaken and giddy with relief.

“We’re luckier than we deserve,” muttered Mackenzie once they were back on the main road.

They gaped like tourists at still-standing, life-size statues of dinosaurs as they drove through Holbrook. (“They were for attracting customers in the Route 66 days,” Freeman said. “It’s all in that Arizona book.”) Minutes later, the vehicles drove one by one up an overgrown ramp to the Interstate. The double two-lane highway was in better shape than they had feared. The convoy proceeded on its way to Flagstaff and Kingman at a jaunty 40 mph.

Mackenzie stood in the gunner’s hatch of the Saladin to watch the scenery and think about what he had read of Daria’s life. Unable to draw any conclusions other than feeling sorry for her, his mind wandered. Mile after mile of pancake-flat desert passed, occasionally enlivened by pine forests and rusted-out wrecks. Only a few signs remained along the highway to remind travelers of the world as it once had been: Joseph City, Winslow, Leupp Corner, Two Guns, Winona. Mackenzie saw with a wistful gaze at a passing sign that an old meteorite crater lay to the south of the Interstate. A visit would have to wait for another time. Old bridges crossed a half-dozen canyons and dry ravines, weathered by heat and cold, but all such structures were found to be vehicle-worthy. When low mountains rose in the west to signal the convoy’s arrival in the vicinity of Flagstaff, the sun had yet to dip below the horizon.

The city, like so many others abandoned after the Zom, had burned down years ago. The ruins were slowly turning into woodland. Only a few buildings remained, preserved by the dry air. Flagstaff also signaled a change in terrain: flat desert gave way to rough, rolling hills covered with pine forests. Trees grew right up to the roadway, their limbs brushing the trucks as they drove past. Barren cliffs rose and fell, mountain peaks came and went. It was beautiful country and beautiful weather in which to see it. Maybe things were taking a turn for the better after all, Mackenzie thought. It was about time. Even his pain pills seemed to be working. He hoped he would keep his left arm, even as bad as it looked.

They were deep in the hills past Flagstaff when the Saladin rounded a shallow curve to the right in the westbound lanes, swinging around a low hill. Mackenzie suddenly felt the armored car slow down. Before he could call down to Freeman and ask why, he noticed something ahead on the road. He squinted into the wind, shielding his eyes against the setting sun.

A vehicle was pulled over by the side of the Interstate a half-mile ahead. It appeared to be an old-style Land Rover, dusty but intact, not a junk heap like every other old car around. Mackenzie grabbed the right gunner's grip of the twin grenade launchers and swung the weapon toward the rover, ready to fire with his right hand. Freeman finished giving a head’s-up to the rest of the convoy by radio, then brought the Saladin to a full stop about two hundred feet back.

Five minutes later, Freeman and Mackenzie walked together toward the Land Rover, searching the terrain for signs of human life. Mackenzie cradled his Thompson sunmachine gun in his right arm. Freeman had the strange black weapon Mackenzie remembered seeing him holding during the ambush at White Sands.

“What the hell is that you’re carrying?” Mackenzie asked as they approached the rover.

“Lack ten,” said Freeman. He kept his gaze moving, never looking at the lieutenant. “You ever hear of the MAC-10? The pre-Zom automatic pistol?”

“It was a bitch. The Landons copied it and made it better. They put a flash and noise suppressor on the barrel and tricked it out, then called it the LAC-10 for Landon Automatic Carbine. This thing can put out a hundred rounds in six seconds with a ram’s-horn clip, but you gotta really hold on to it ‘cause of the recoil. Nobody but Godzilla will fuck with me after the first clip.”

“Fuck, no, I borrowed it from a crate on the flatbed with the Gatling guns. Can we talk about this later? You’re making me nervous.”

“Someone’s inside there,” said Mackenzie, raising his Tommy gun to brace the butt against his shoulder. “Driver’s seat.”

“I see ‘im.” Freeman moved away from Mackenzie to go around the Land Rover on its right side while Mackenzie went to the left. They slowed their pace until they had a good view of the occupant through the rolled-down windows.

All that was left of the driver’s head was his skull, covered with brown flakes of skin. Clenched white teeth were set in the familiar rictus of death. The body’s stained jumpsuit clung to his ribcage as if glued on.

“Motherfucker’s dead,” said Freeman, stepping back. He turned to scan the landscape again, then raised the barrel of his automatic carbine into the air. “He’s been here maybe a couple months, enough time to get mummified and everything.”

Mackenzie wondered if once again a survivor of the Zom had missed rescue. He lowered his Tommy gun, sick at heart, then looked into the rear cargo area and felt sicker. “Another one’s in the back.”

Freeman carefully pulled the passenger door open to look inside. “Doesn’t even stink in here,” he said. “Hey, they got a duffle bag or something on the floor, and a briefcase with—oh, shit.”

“This stuff’s from Landon Armaments,” said Freeman. “These two are Landons’ people. What the fuck were they doing way out here?”

That changed things. “I bet they were doing what Jodie was doing,” said Mackenzie, lowering his submachine gun and removing his finger from the trigger. “They came out looking for bombs. The Landons must have been at this for a long time.”

“Shit, man, didn’t I tell you that way back there when I found that dosimeter in her stuff? Don’t you claim you came up with the idea, now, ‘cause I’m the one who did all the brain work on it. I knew this fucking caravan was messed up. I fucking knew it!”

“I can’t tell what they died of.” Mackenzie frowned as he peered inside the vehicle. “It looks like they were sleeping. The guy in back is lying down, wrapped up in a blanket. The driver turned off the engine and then sat there, hands in his lap. He moved his seat so he could settle back.”

They studied the bodies. Several other soldiers walked up, including the Old Man.

“The windows are open,” said Mackenzie. “It wasn’t carbon monoxide. No broken bones, no bullet wounds, no nothing. No sign of a struggle. Looks like blood stains on his clothes, but I can’t tell. They just went to sleep and died.”

“That’s the only way to go,” said Freeman. He pulled the duffel bag and briefcase from the Land Rover after slinging the LAC-10 over one shoulder. “Let’s see what kind of fancy undies they packed for their honeymoon.”

The duffel bag was emptied out by the side of the road. “Dosimeters,” said the Old Man. “Clothing. Batteries. More clothes. First aid kit. Two .45s.” He toed a rotting book. “Survival guide.”

“That sure helped,” said Freeman. “Hey, Lobo, can I take a hit off your jay? Oh, c’mon, bro!”

The Old Man walked over to stand by the rover driver’s window. He studied the skeletal corpse from different angles. Mackenzie watched carefully, expecting at any moment the general would touch the body to learn something using whatever psychic powers he had—this though the thought of touching the decomposed bodies made Mackenzie shiver. The Old Man did not touch the bodies, however. After inspecting the vehicle in detail, he shook his head and went back to his tractor trailer. “We leave in ten minutes!” he called.

Several men gave the Land Rover a brief inspection, but no one took anything else from the vehicle or bodies. Many of the items from the duffel bag disappeared. Freeman kept the briefcase and two uncharged dosimeters. “I’m going to do my own detective work,” he told Mackenzie on their way back to the Saladin.

“Maybe something in the briefcase killed them,” said Mackenzie. “Maybe it’s radioactive.”

Freeman stopped and gave Mackenzie an annoyed look. He then squatted down on the highway, put the briefcase on the ground, and tried to open it. “Locked,” he said. “Fuck it.” He got up and carried it to the armored car. Ten minutes later, anyone looking back from the convoy saw the Land Rover and its crew disappear in the distance.

Mackenzie stood in the turret again, thinking. The warmth of the day lingered in the wind.

The two guys in the Land Rover just went to sleep and died. That was all there was to it. Went to sleep and died. And bled a while as they did, like something had been cutting or feeding on them, kind of like what happened to D—

Mackenzie got down from the turret and snatched up a radio mike. “Wolfonetoalphawolfover!”

“We can’t stop for the night, sir! I mean, we shouldn’t. We have to keep going. I’m serious. We can’t—”

“Wolf Pack, all stop, all stop. Stay in your vehicles.” The convoy ground to a halt in the middle of the highway's westbound lanes, wheels astride the faded white dashes.

Why doesn’t he just read my damn mind? We’re wasting time talking! “Sir, we can’t stop here, anywhere around here. In the transcript, Daria said that—”

“Wait.” Looking pained, the Old Man put a hand to his forehead and shut his eyes. He stood in silence for a few moments, then lowered his hand. He looked tired. “I get it. You may have a point. We can keep going tonight, but I want us to set up camp once we’re past Kingman and rest if we have to. We need to be at our best when we get to Death Valley. We’ll post guards in twos when we do stop, and we’ll keep everyone close by.”

“Thank you, sir.” Mackenzie climbed back into the Saladin while General Armalin told the troops of their need to rotate drivers and keep going. Roadside breaks would be very short for the rest of the evening.

“What’s going on with you and the general?” asked Freeman. “What’d you tell him?”

Freeman thought about that. He then started the Saladin and threw it into gear. The convoy set off.

The red sun disappeared below the rugged horizon. Headlights and targeting spotlights came on as the twilight sky turned red and purple. More miles went by through rocky deserts, rolling hills, and scattered forests. The sky darkened and was crowned with uncountable stars, diamond dust against the night.

Standing alone in the Saladin’s turret, Mackenzie looked into the night and thought about vampires. Vampire bats weren’t supposed to live this far north according to zoology books, but those were written in the 1960s before the Zom and the radiation and God knew what else came along. He had never seen a real vampire bat or heard of anyone who had seen one. He knew they weren’t huge, leather-winged monsters. They were quite small but had needle-like teeth. Their saliva had an anesthetic in it so a sleeping victim wouldn’t feel a bite, plus an anticoagulant to keep the blood running long after it should have stopped. Why Daria hadn’t died from her wounds after being attacked twice was a mystery. Why the two Landon Armaments men sleeping in an open vehicle at night did die, that was no mystery at all. They had bled to death while little vampires drank them dry. Little vampire bats who lived in fallout. Little mutant vampire bats. Maybe they could tell the difference between a sleeping victim and one that was awake. Maybe they ganged up on their victims like winged piranhas. A victim could bleed out in minutes and never know what happened.

The convoy wasn't driving through uncivilized wilderness. This was a madhouse in Hell.

The thought of bats clinging to him and sucking out his blood terrified Mackenzie as nothing else could. He could not stand to show fear in front of the others, so he draped an old blanket over his back and head like a hooded cloak, doubled it up for extra thickness, and hoped it was protection enough. If anyone asked, he planned to claim he was cold despite the warmth of the evening. He clutched his .357 in his right hand and waited. Every few minutes he thought he felt something on his back, but nothing was ever there. His left arm ached but he ignored it. He was pretty sure at this point that he was soon going to die.

His mind ran down a path that bordered madness, struggling to hang on to the few shreds of courage he still carried inside him. Yea, though we drive through the kingdom of the shadow of death, I will fear no hell beasts or vampires, for Thou art with me; my guns and ammo, they comfort me. Thou preparest interlocking fields of fire before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou loadest my weapons with hell-burning incendiaries; my kill zone runneth over.

“Are you cold or something up there, lieutenant?” called Freeman from below. “Hey, sir?”

I was a fool to have volunteered for this trip. I could be burning zom bodies back at Camp Flipper, spending my off time drinking and smoking weed and getting laid. I could be asleep in bed in Houston, working my way through business school in the day and helping my dad out on weekends. I could be doing anything other than this. I could be a living man instead of the walking dead.

The terror began to pass. He wiped his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and he could deal with it again.

“Thanks,” he said to Freeman. He pulled off the blanket, dropped it down the ladder, then eyed the dual grenade launcher. It still had conventional explosives belted into it. He put away his .357 and laboriously changed out the launcher's ammo with one hand, one belt box into the left and one into the right, readying extra 36-round cases of incendiary rounds when the first two boxes were empty. When he was finished, he jerked back the charging levers, locked them down, and flipped the safety off. Any vampires out tonight were going to suck white phosphorus long before they got anywhere near the blood of 1st Lt. Michael James Mackenzie.

“Three miles,” called Freeman, stretching in his seat. “I gotta get out and take a walk. My ass hurts from sitting here.”

“Call the Old Man and ask which way he wants us to turn,” said Mackenzie, remembering the maps. He pulled one out and looked it over with a penlight. “We can stay on 40 and go south around Goose Lake, then up U.S. 95 to Vegas, or we can take U.S. 93 to go across Hoover Dam. It all depends on whether Hoover Dam’s still there.”

The map put away, Mackenzie idly drummed his fingers on the firing handle of the grenade launcher. He felt strangely serene. His moment of uncertainty had left him. Hey, vampires, let’s see you fly across the Moon or something. Come and try this bad boy out. It’s not like we’re going to live forever. Get this party started.

“The general wants us to take the Interstate around to the west side of the Mojave Valley and go north from there,” said Freeman. “He doesn’t think we can negotiate the roads near the dam. It’s all mountainous and we can’t back up if there’s been a rock fall or anything. And he doesn’t know what’s up with the dam, either.”

Black hills and buttes stood out against the star-filled sky ahead. Other than the cracked highway under their wheels, there was little sign that a city once sprawled around them, nestled against the highlands. According to the maps, downtown Kingman lay in a shallow basin on the other side of a series of ridges twenty stories high. Once beyond that, they would follow I-40 through more such cuts until they came out the other side a few minutes later on the plains of the Sacramento Wash. Goose Lake was one or two hours after that, then it was north again to Vegas—and into Death Valley to find Daria.

Mackenzie rubbed his face as the Saladin passed through a steep-sided road cut and over an old bridge. Getting careless, he thought, but the Interstate bridges were so far solid. It still seemed suicidal, not testing them. He was sure he was going crazy. Maybe that was what he had to do in order to survive in this place. Go a little crazy. Do something unexpected. The Saladin passed barren cliffs and mesas, rock-filled gullies, more bridges, rusting guardrails. Freeman was singing “We Shall Overcome” in a soft low voice as he drove.

He saw something on the road ahead. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. Was that people?

Freeman hit the brakes. The Saladin skidded over the asphalt on all six tires, coming to rest at a slight angle on the highway near the right shoulder. Mackenzie stared speechless at what lay ahead in the armored car’s headlights. Then he grabbed the turret’s main spotlight, flicked it on, and aimed it up the road.

They stood across the Interstate lanes and down the sides of the road and off to the left and right as far as the spotlight could show, filling the low valley like a great pale carpet. Nothing else was visible, neither road signs nor houses nor trees nor bushes, nothing except zoms and more zoms and even more zoms and infinitely more zoms stretching into the darkness. They stood with glittering eyes facing the Saladin. They were looking right at Mackenzie. They made no sound.

So that’s where they went, he thought in disbelief. They were waiting for us here. Someone really is controlling them. The Satan hypothesis is true.

Mackenzie heard tires squeal as the tractor-trailers behind him came to sudden stops. The Saladin was a hundred yards ahead of the nearest vehicle, all by itself in the middle of no man’s land. Someone behind the Saladin fired a red flare into the sky. When it burst, it illuminated everything before them in the ruins of downtown Kingman.

Zoms as far as the eye could see, up to a mile away in the light of the falling flare. Possibly over a million of them in every direction Mackenzie looked except behind him. The nearest were forty yards ahead.

“I think we should leave, sir,” Freeman called over the rumble of the engine in an unnaturally high voice. “Is that okay with you?”

One moment later, every zom in sight surged toward the Saladin. They broke into a dead run with their arms out and their rotting mouths open. The thunder of their coming was an earthquake.

Mackenzie cursed as he grabbed the right grip of the twin grenade launchers, swung the weapon toward the nearest zoms, and squeezed the trigger without bothering to use the starlight scope. He was a dead man. All that was left for him to do was the hardest thing of all.

Interstate 40 at downtown Kingman
Former state of Arizona
Friday morning, midnight to noon, September 3, 1999

Mackenzie fired the grenade launchers directly into the zoms attacking from the highway, swinging the twin barrels to the right to catch more zoms coming up a shallow depression between the road and a two-story cliff face from a road cut. In seconds the weapon hammered the vast mob with projectiles that blasted heads and limbs from running bodies before exploding in dazzling fountains of white and yellow flame. The detonations flattened zoms for tens of yards around as they flung burning chunks of phosphorus into the night like skyrockets, setting countless other zoms on fire. Mackenzie swung the weapon left and hosed down the front line a second time with shorter bursts, catching a few zoms he missed earlier before he blasted grenades into the horde far to the left. In moments a long wall of raging fire and white smoke shrouded most of the attacking zoms from view. Mackenzie saw dozens of burning zoms slap at their smoking skins or writhe on the ground with soundless screams.

Without warning the Saladin jerked and went into reverse, throwing Mackenzie against the forward lip of the hatch and knocking the grenade launcher grip out of his hand. Cursing, Mackenzie yelled for Freeman to turn the armored car around and get back to the convoy, but Freeman continued to back up blind, gaining speed. As Mackenzie caught the launcher grip again he remembered that prolonged firing risked overheating the barrels and causing the weapon to explode in his face, but he sent two last bursts into the zom mob for good measure before turning around to see where the Saladin was going.

The other trucks were already taking defensive positions to meet the stupendous human-wave attack. The flatbed tractor-trailer with the Landon Lightnings was the nearest vehicle. It was backing up, swinging the trailer into the flat median between the eastbound and westbound lanes until the rear of the trailer faced the attacking zoms to give the eight mounted Lightnings the best possible fields of fire into the horde. The Saladin was approaching the flatbed rapidly, aiming roughly for the cab. Mackenzie screamed at Freeman to stop, but the Saladin instead swung hard around while still traveling backward, its six tires howling as they skidded over the asphalt, and completed a near-perfect one-eighty spin. Freeman then stomped the gas and roared to the left around the tractor cab, almost going off the shoulder into the ditch between the freeway lane and the cliff cut. He then whipped the armored car to the right to avoid the gasoline tanker parked by the freeway’s outer shoulder.

A horrified Mackenzie saw the Saladin come within a yard of running over three soldiers fleeing the tanker on their way to crew the Lightnings on the flatbed. As he cursed Freeman royally there was a blaze of orange flame and a thunderclap that rang his ears and jolted every bone in him. An afterimage of the tank destroyer hung in Mackenzie’s vision, illuminated by a great fireball at its muzzle. The brief scream of the shell going downrange ended with a blinding white flash barely a quarter of a mile away that caused men to instinctively shield their faces. Fiery streamers of white phosphorus arced high out of the blast and fell on the ocean of zoms below, setting hundreds ablaze.

Freeman drove the Saladin over the dusty median and came to a stop on the eastbound lane, between the tank destroyer’s trailer and the flatbed. Mackenzie saw him poke his head out from the view port to look around, then withdraw and back up over the median again to avoid being hit by fire from the tank destroyer or the Lightnings. As Mackenzie grabbed the grenade launcher’s right grip, Freeman shut the engine down, locked the brakes, and climbed out the commander’s hatch next to Mackenzie. “Kill whitey!” he yelled, invoking a much older name for the zoms, then jumped shirtless from the armored car with a LAC-10 in either hand and ran to defend the flatbed.

The M36 boomed fire and hurled another white phosphorus shell downrange. Mackenzie saw in the muzzle flash that the entire flank of the convoy was about to be overrun by a tidal wave of zoms perhaps a thousand deep and only a few hundred feet away. He pointed the grenade launchers and squeezed the trigger without bothering to aim. Each launcher pounded out rounds four times a second, showering grenades left-to-right in a long arc. A wall of blinding flames erupted where the missiles struck, slicing through the zom wave for over a hundred yards along its front and cutting down the larger part of the attack in seconds. In the light from the explosions and fires, Mackenzie then saw that the zoms coming next were forced by the masses behind them to either run into the wall of flames or be knocked down and trampled flat. Hundreds of zoms ran into the inferno, caught fire, and fell or ran in random directions, flailing their arms as they burned alive. Most of these were crushed underfoot in seconds, their dying bodies shielding the following zoms from the flaming white phosphorus. The attack regained its momentum and came on.

Desperate to stop the new zom wave, Mackenzie squeezed the grenade-launchers’ trigger—but heard the launchers only click, their ammo boxes empty. Shouting in frustration, he climbed halfway out of the hatch to unlock and ditch the ammo boxes so he could lock fresh ones in. He was terrified he wasn’t going to finish in time to stop the zoms who were running over their own dead and dying to get at the convoy. He banged his left arm on the launcher grips and burned his right forearm twice on a hot gun barrel, but he barely felt it. The air stank of burned raw flesh and—to Mackenzie’s surprise—an odor like garlic, the hallmark scent of WP fire.

A strange roaring buzz came to his ears from the right, a sound like a giant chainsaw being revved up. He turned and saw the Landon Lightnings open fire.

One soldier operated each Lightning using rear grips and a trigger similar to those on Mackenzie’s grenade launchers, but each stood and swiveled the weapon to direct fire at the zoms. Most of the gunners were hastily trained but took to their jobs well. Bright tracer streams moving faster than the eye could follow swept continuously across the front of the zom horde. In the hellish firelight Mackenzie saw zoms fly apart from the lead ranks to hundreds of feet deep in the mob. Zoms disintegrated before his eyes under the impact of thousands of rocket-propelled rounds every second. A pinkish spray of pureed flesh and bone was flung thirty feet high into the drifting clouds of phosphorus smoke, to drizzle down over all in the wind.

An incendiary tank shell exploded less than the length of a football field away from the convoy. Mackenzie flung the last empty ammo box overboard and reached for a full box of grenades to load into the left gun. He heard something behind him but thought it was Freeman—until two white arms grabbed him around the head and tried to break his neck. He fell back against the rear lip of the hatch as he threw off the attacker, then pulled out his .357, turned, and shot the zom in the face. As it fell, he saw twenty or thirty zoms had gotten through and were going after the soldiers on the Lightnings as well as his own vehicle. Mackenzie saw Freeman and a handful of other men shooting zoms down at point-blank range along the flatbed’s sides. Two soldiers were fighting zoms hand-to-hand. Someone screamed in incoherent agony.

A stray burst of automatic gunfire sent bullets ricocheting from the Saladin’s hull armor. Two of the right tires exploded and the vehicle began to list. Mackenzie shot two zoms climbing onto the back of his vehicle, grabbed his sawed-off shotgun, and blew off the head of a third attempting to scale the car’s right side. He heard a zom climb up the front of the Saladin, turned, struck it savagely in the head with the barrel of his shotgun, then blew out its chest with the second barrel. He flung the shotgun at more attacking zoms, grabbed for his Thompson where it hung inside the turret, and pulled it out. The submachine gun spit flame as he fired down into a crowd of fresh zoms, barely able to control the weapon until he forced the aching fingers of his left hand to steady it. When the drum emptied he threw the gun and pulled the machete from its back sheath. He felt a painful sting in his right side and swung around, lashing outward. To his surprise the blade cut only air. Three more zoms climbed onto the Saladin’s rear and tried to get up the turret. He sliced down through the face of one and hacked a grasping arm from the second. As the two dropped he turned and chopped sideways through the top of the other’s head. It fell from the vehicle with its brains spilling out.

Gunfire cut down several zoms that had reached the sides of Saladin, blowing out the third tire on the right side. The Saladin sank down on its left tire rims, putting Mackenzie in more jeopardy as it was now easier to get onto the lowest side of the armored car. He saw that he had a breathing space and turned to reload the grenade launcher. His right side ached and felt warm and wet. As he locked in the left ammo box, he saw a new zom wave was almost upon him. He grabbed the grenade launchers’ grip, aimed, and fired without stopping. The left launcher hammered round after round into the onslaught. Geysers of searing yellow flame blasted upward in front of his vehicle. The heat of the detonations burned his face and hands. He swept the barrels back and forth until the ammo was exhausted.

It occurred to him for a split second that he could get down inside the Saladin and close the hatches to wait out the rest of the attack, perhaps firing from the driver’s view port if there were anything left inside to shoot with. He discarded the idea without regret. The flatbed was vulnerable and had to be saved at all costs. It had the only weapons left that gave the convoy even a microscopic a chance of survival. He picked up his machete and stood up in the turret, fired with pure adrenaline.

More zoms began climbing up the low right side of the disabled Saladin to greet him.

For some reason it made him angry to see that the zoms weren’t going to quit. Until now he had fought them out of fear and sheer survival instinct. Now something about the zoms was really pissing him off. They didn’t know when they were beaten. They didn’t know when to quit and let well enough be. They had killed his mother, whom he did not remember, and they had murdered millions of innocents the world over. They just wouldn’t stop.

He hated zoms in that moment. He hated them like he hated nothing else in the universe. Zoms stared at him with the lifeless eyes of madmen and reached for him with chalk-white fingers.

Mackenzie yelled as he cut open the skulls of two zoms at once, then chopped off the right arm of a third. The tilt of the armored car meant that the mindless zoms went after him only from the lower side, not the wheeled side where they could not see him but could have taken him from behind. There was only a limited space for them to attack, which was entirely to his advantage. He swung down, split a zom’s head open to its shoulders, hacked down again and broke another’s spine, hacked down again and removed an arm at the elbow. The machete seemed to be moving of its own accord. Mackenzie thought of his dog and saw red. Explosions lit up the darkness around him. Rivers of fire poured from the Lightnings on the flatbed.

He could not strike at the zoms fast enough. They fell like stalks of wheat. A zom lost its eyes, another its hands, another its lower jaw. Hands and arms were sliced to ribbons. Then his machete stuck in the chest of a zom that wrenched the sweat-slickened hilt from Mackenzie’s grip as it collapsed. He was out of the hatch in an instant and down among the zoms, punching and elbowing and kicking until he got the machete again and backed himself against the Saladin. Another went down, then another, then another. He believed he had been fighting them for days. It seemed it would never end.

Someone yelled his name. He hacked down a zom attempting to get up on its hands and knees, then jammed the blade through another’s pale neck and out the other side. More were yelling his name, all around him. He swung around, almost stumbling over the bodies piled at his feet, looking for a new target.

Stop it, men were yelling. He swung the machete around, daring one of them to attack him. No one did. Stop it, lieutenant. Stop it before you hit somebody, they yelled.

He screamed and waved the machete in one hand, defiant. Come and get it, he screamed. Come and get it. I’ll kill you all. I’ll kill every one of you for what you did. I’ll kill you all.

Fucking stop it, for the love of God, a shirtless man yelled at him. He looked vaguely familiar. Get to the tank trailer fast as you can. We’re bugging out before the rest of them get through. Go to the tank trailer, damn you.

Mackenzie stopped swinging his machete. Freezing sweat ran into his eyes and dripped from his face. The machete dropped from his nerveless fingers. He swayed where he stood, the world swimming in his vision.

Get to the tank trailer, said the shirtless man, pointing. Hurry up, we have to get the fuck out of here now.

Mackenzie stared at the shirtless man with a blank expression. Moments later the shirtless man had Mackenzie’s left arm over his neck, guiding and supporting him as they stumbled over dead zoms and spent rifle shells and rocks. It was hard to see through the white smoke. Mackenzie began coughing. Everything smelled like roasted rotting meat with garlic seasoning. He suddenly threw up and couldn’t stop. The shirtless man kept him moving until they reached the tank destroyer trailer. The tractor was already running. Men were climbing on the semi-trailer, holding injured men to them. Mackenzie fell down and vomited until he had dry heaves. Someone helped him up, then made him lie down on the wheel deck by the tank, only two feet above the ground.

There they are, other men began to shout. They’re coming, go go go, there they are, go go you bastards go now.

Mackenzie thought of his dog. Rascal was back there. He had to get him. He tried to get up but the shirtless man held him back. He was too tired to resist. The tractor roared and the tank-hauling semi-trailer began to roll, wheels thumping over dead zoms and rocks until it was back on flat dusty asphalt. Men were crying and calling out to Jesus all around him. He looked back and thought he saw Rascal running after the tractor-trailer with his tongue hanging out, his black and white fur blowing in the breeze. The sight made him smile.

Good dog, he said, moving his lips without making a sound. He closed his eyes and slumped against the rattling wheel deck. Good dog.

Interstate 40, 10 miles east of Kingman, to desert wilderness, 10 miles southwest of Kingman
Former state of Arizona
Friday afternoon and evening, September 3, 1999

Mackenzie sat on the floor with his back to a concrete pillar and tried to make his right hand stop shaking. His fingers had a fine tremor that had not been there before, jittery and irritating and strange. He tried to hold his fingers still by pressing them to his knee, tried to make a fist and then relax his arm muscles, but nothing worked. Worse, his left arm was beginning to ache in an increasingly unpleasant way. He undid the sling and dressing, crying from pain as he did, and discovered the problem. The wound was swollen and red and leaking pus: infected. All the antibiotic tablets were with the medicine chest on the trailer with the Lightnings, miles away and surrounded by zoms. Part of an arm bone was still visible, radius or ulna—he couldn’t remember which was which. He needed to clean the wound with alcohol, no matter how much it hurt, and take pills to stop the infection as fast as possible. He could do neither. On top of that, he had no pain pills left. His right hand shook as he re-bandaged the gunshot wound, but he made not a sound.

To take his mind off the pain, Mackenzie took a head count of the survivors with him. Less than a third the men who had started out on this ill-starred expedition remained: ten out of thirty-three, not counting the two Landons. His gaze passed over the handful of shell-shocked survivors sitting on the concrete floor of the abandoned garage at the old truck stop where they had taken refuge. Only three men were uninjured, including Freeman and the Old Man. Five were walking wounded like Mackenzie: able to move about, handle a weapon, and perform a few duties. Two were in worse shape, in great pain and unable to walk, but they were still conscious. Everyone else was either dead, presumed dead in the battle the night before, or had gone missing back at White Sands.

The old master sergeant, Lucas, was among those presumed dead in the firefight at Kingman. No one knew what had happened to him. The Old Man took it hard. Since before dawn he had stayed outside the garage, standing guard by himself in the tractor-trailer cab to let everyone else rest. He had spoken to no one.

Mackenzie checked his battered wristwatch. It was almost noon. He had given up a full canteen of water and the rest of his pain pills to the two most seriously injured men. His mouth was drier than desert air. He wondered if he would be mummified after his death, like the dead men in the Land Rover. Maybe the vampire bats would find him and the others as they died. Hell of a way to go. Probably better than being chewed up by a giant hyena, but not by much.

Precisely at noon, the Old Man walked into the garage through the open bay door. He came to a stop in the shade and waited until he had everyone’s attention.

“I need volunteers,” he said in a steady voice. “All of our food, water, and medicine are still on the cargo trailer with the Landon Lightnings. It’s not likely the zoms will fool with it. Our only chance for survival is to take back those supplies and get the gas tanker. We’re going to make only one attempt to do it. If the zoms are still around in force, we’ll turn around and come back.”

“If we can’t get our stuff, are you sayin’ we’re goin’ home?” asked one man smoking a cigarette stub. His chest was wound up in bandages to protect his broken ribs.

The Old Man hesitated. “No,” he said. “We’ll try something else, but we’re not going home.”

The other man coughed and crushed out the cigarette butt on the floor. “That’s good, sir,” he said, “‘cause it was my understandin’ that this unit don’t ever give up. Count me in.”

“Thank you, Staff Sergeant Jones,” said the general. It was an on-the-spot promotion, as the speaker had moments earlier been a buck private. “Anyone else?”

“Me,” said Mackenzie in a dull voice, lifting a hand. “I’m in.” What else was there to do?

By the open garage door where he sat atop an oil drum, Freeman took a joint from his mouth and blew out a long cloud of fragrant smoke. “Fuck, man, let’s all go,” he said. “We’re dead anyway without our shit. At least let us go back in the daytime so I can see what the fuck I’m shooting at.”

“I agree,” said Mackenzie. “We should all go.” Everyone looked at him in surprise. He kept his tone level and cool. “We’re not leaving anyone behind in this hellhole. It’s everyone or no one.”

He was thinking of the two dead men who vanished during their stopover at Omega, New Mexico. He thought it likely that everyone else was thinking of them, too.

“Let’s do it, man,” said a man with both legs in splints. “I can shoot.”

“Yeah, let’s do it!” Most of the men began to clap hands and shout. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

The Old Man looked at the cheering men and straightened his posture. His eyes grew brighter. “Bus leaves in five minutes,” he said, cracking a thin smile. “Be on it. Lieutenant Mackenzie, I need to see you for a second.”

The soldiers got up and helped get those unable to move out of the garage. Mackenzie watched them go as he got to his feet, thinking they’d have to throw blankets or old cardboard over parts of the tank and trailer to keep the men from being burned on the hot metal. The Old Man walked over as Mackenzie put on his cap. “Sir?”

“We’ve got eleven shells left in the M36,” said the general. “Six are high explosive, the rest are WP. Sergeant Foster and I are the only ones left who can fire the thing, but Private Morris can work with Foster and be more efficient than Foster or I would be alone. There’s still a hell of a lot of smoke coming out of Kingman. The smoke trail overhead is over fifteen miles long. We might have started a firestorm there last night, in which case I couldn’t say if there’s anything left of our vehicles worth salvaging.”

“There wasn’t any grass or trees where we were, sir,” said Mackenzie, thinking. “We were on bare desert and rock and highway. I don’t remember seeing anything flammable around, except maybe the vehicles. It’s a little off-topic, but I didn’t notice any fire damage to the eastern half of Kingman before we went through the road cuts. Nothing must’ve burned down there since the Zom.”

The Old Man looked around and saw that they were alone in the garage. He turned to Mackenzie with a grim expression. “The ash falling out of that smoke is radioactive,” he said in a low voice. “I got a reading of a hundred eighty-nine milliroentgens. It’s coming down all over this area. I didn’t have time to check Kingman for radiation before we got there, but either there was a lot of fallout around from that old nuclear plant, or else the zoms there came in from areas that had a significant amount of radioactivity. I tend to believe the latter, as this area around here wasn’t that radioactive till the ashfall. Either way, Kingman could be hot in every sense of the word, so we can’t stay. We don’t have a choice about going there. We’ve got to get our supplies or we’re going to eat a lot of tumbleweed from now on.”

“I hate to say it, but it’s for the best. We have to keep moving or die, and a little radiation poisoning is better than starvation or dying of thirst. I’ve still got those iodide tablets. Everyone gets one before we go.”

“The zoms, si—I mean, the zoms, they were waiting for us. When we saw ‘em, they were just standing there all over the place looking at us, not doing a thing. It was like they knew we were coming, or… or like whoever was controlling them knew it, like in that Satan hypothesis everyone talks about.”

The Old Man rubbed a hand over his bald scalp. “I don’t know what to tell you about that,” he said. “If someone is controlling them, he’s doing a damn lousy job of it. Except for that bunch in Kingman last night, you can’t get two zoms to do anything together except chase a black man. It doesn’t make any sense they’d wise up now.”

“Where could they have come from? There must have been hundreds of thousands of them waiting for us. I know Kingman didn’t have that many people in it. Did they just walk here?”

“I was thinking about that, too. I don’t know the answer.” The Old Man sighed. “Anymore, there isn’t a hell of a lot that I know about anything. Every day I learn more about what I don’t know than what I do.” He turned to go. “Let’s mount up before everyone out there starves to death waiting on us.”

Freeman (now Sergeant Freeman, to his great displeasure, as he feared it meant more work for him) was made the truck’s driver because of his uncanny ability to back up a vehicle without crashing it. The plan was simple: they would drive to Kingman one more time, using the same route as before, then turn the tractor-trailer around before entering Kingman itself and slowly drive in backwards, trailer first. The tank destroyer would have a clear field of fire that way, and the truck wouldn’t have to turn around if escape became necessary. The men riding on the tank or trailer could also dismount and swing out the trailer supports to keep the tank from falling over, or they could open fire on attackers. The group was short on weapons and ammunition but could mount a respectable defense for several minutes if they needed to make a quick getaway. Reaching the battlefield and recovering the other vehicles was all they needed to do—that and find a way through or around town to continue on to rescue Daria and her secrets.

With Freeman in the cab were the Old Man and a private, one of the walking wounded, who would handle the machine gun on the roof. The Old Man put a sergeant with a badly sprained ankle and an uninjured private in the turret of the tank destroyer in case major firepower was needed. The private with the broken legs rode on the tank’s side fender with two loaded .45s. He was tied down so he wouldn’t fall off. On the tank’s opposite fender was the new staff sergeant, Jones, with Freeman’s LAC-10 (another source of the former corporal’s current state of irritation). Mackenzie and a private named Lobo, who had second-degree burns from white phosphorus on his arms and legs, sat behind the tractor cab on the trailer, over the fifth-wheel coupling. Lobo did little except groan and curse when he moved. He had no weapons, as his cloth-wrapped hands were too badly burned to hold anything. Mackenzie had a semi-automatic shotgun that had once belonged to the master sergeant, but only five shells left in it.

It occurred to Mackenzie as the tractor’s diesel engine roared to life that this was the first time during the entire expedition that he could remember everyone’s name. It did not seem like such an achievement now. He wondered if any of them would see Texas again. He did not expect that they would. On the chances of successfully rescuing Daria and stopping the Zom, he refused to speculate, even to himself.

A half hour later, a backwards-traveling tractor-trailer crossed an overpass in the eastern side of Kingman at a steady 20 mph. A few zoms had been shot down near the freeway, but there was nothing like the horde the night before. Every gun was loaded and ready. Tiny bits of gray ash drifted down from the smoke-filled sky like snow. It fell on everything in sight. The abandoned city looked very strange now with gray roofs, gray roads, gray everything.

“That’s one hell of a fire,” mumbled Lobo, eying the enormous column of smoke rolling skyward from behind the low hills ahead. It was the first thing he’d said that morning that was printable.

Mackenzie brushed ash from his clothes, trying not to act like he was doing anything important. The truck kept moving backwards, the trailer perfectly aligned with the road. If he’s driving with his knees again, Mackenzie thought, glancing behind him at Freeman, I swear to God I’ll strangle him.

Another small group of zoms appeared and was dispatched. The freeway lanes soon swung to the south around low hills and road cuts, facing directly into—

“Whoa,” said Lobo with wide eyes. “That’s something.” He seemed momentarily unaware of his injuries.

Great flames leaped skyward in the distance, briefly visible through dense, drifting clouds of smoke. Mackenzie spotted a zom coming up, but someone shot it before he did. No one paid much attention to anything except the approaching inferno.

“Smells like onion or something, like someone’s cooking a bad roast. Is that garlic? You smell it, too?”

A group of twenty or thirty zoms stumbled into view ahead, then ran toward them along the highway. The truck slowed down. “Wait till we’re closer,” said Jones, taking careful aim. “Don’t waste ammo.”

The zoms got closer. Someone fired, then everyone did. Zoms staggered and jerked and fell until none were left. Several tried to get up and crawl toward the truck.

“Don’t shoot the ones that’re down,” called Jones. “Don’t shoot ‘em. Let ‘em lie. Don’t waste ammo.”

The truck did exactly that. Diverted for a few moments, the men then went back to watching ten-story-high flames jump toward the heavens.

“I see the trucks!” said the sergeant in the turret of the M36. “They’re still there!”

They were low on ammunition by the time they got to the place that almost became their last stand. They coughed on the smoke and covered their mouths to keep from breathing the steadily falling ash. It was hard to see farther than a quarter mile most of the time. The blast-furnace heat from the titanic fire consuming western Kingman felt like it could burn bare skin, though the nearest major flames were a hundred yards away. Mackenzie wondered if a gas or oil facility had blown up in the area. And where were all the other zoms? He nervously scanned the hilltops around them, but no significant number was in view, only small groups. He wondered if most of them had been caught in the firestorm. It certainly smelled like it. The stench made his stomach churn.

Those men who could walk quickly dismounted, shot all nearby zoms, then began collecting weapons left on the ground during the fighting. Mackenzie went to the Saladin. Gasoline had leaked out all over the ground from a ruptured fuel line when the armored car fell on its side, then it had evaporated in the heat. The spare tires were shot to pieces, so none of the damaged tires could be replaced. He groaned in defeat. The Saladin would stay behind forever, sorely missed. He stepped around vast numbers of dead zoms, picking up dropped weapons. Nothing about the place looked familiar. It was hard to believe he’d ever been here before. He picked up his machete, wiped it off, and slid it into the empty sheath on his back.

Master Sergeant Lucas, frail but in good spirits, had spent the night in the cab of the tanker, lying across the front seat out of sight of the zoms. “Thought you’d all run off and left me,” he said with a weak smile as they pulled him out, careful of the blood-soaked bandages around his chest. Top had been in too much pain to help against the zoms, so he had stayed where he would be safe, planning to use the machine gun on the roof if attacked. The three other men from the tanker had been killed in the fighting, so word of his location was lost. Soldiers cheered the master sergeant and laughed for the first time that day. The Old Man helped carry him back to the tractor trailer, smiling and calling Top a sneaky old s.o.b. the whole way. They were up to eleven living now. The day looked better.

The others that had been left behind, however, were as dead as dead could get. Everyone knew they were down when they’d left the night before, but finding them now was still hard. Rescuing Top made up for it a little.

While walking around the armored car looking for valuable supplies, Mackenzie shot two approaching zoms. They were in bad shape, staggering around with their bodies smoking from severe white phosphorus burns. After they were dead Mackenzie was angry with himself for shooting them. He wished he had let them live, tortured and crippled and useless, until something mean came along and ate them alive. He climbed into the Saladin and pulled out as much ammunition and supplies as he could find, then carried it back to the tank trailer. The Landon Armaments briefcase Freeman had found was recovered, too. Mackenzie resisted the urge to open it. He was too tired to care.

The last thing Mackenzie took from the Saladin was Freeman’s marijuana stash from the front left toolbox, thinking the new sergeant would be happy to have a toke again. Mackenzie also decided to give the shotgun back to Top. It had only one shell left, but it was better than nothing. He had his own sawed-off shotgun and other weapons once more, all fully loaded, but his shotgun was a ten-gauge and the ammo wasn’t interchangeable with Top’s.

“Don’t start the trucks until we’re ready to go,” the Old Man told everyone at a quick meeting. “Let’s hurry it up. We’ll refuel later.”

Everyone looked toward the worst part of the inferno. It ran across the Interstate a quarter-mile away. Even the asphalt appeared to be burning.

“Can’t go north unless we go all the way back to Flagstaff and drive up from there to see if that other Interstate was finished,” said Mackenzie, holding a map. He looked at it closely. “We could go back a little and poke around, see if an old road or trail crosses the hills south of here. We might get through on a wide creek bed. There were some roads going south from I-40, I remember.”

The flatbed trailer was in fair shape despite two blown tires. Five of the mounted Lightnings were empty; those were unlatched from their bases, thrown to the ground, and replaced with new, fully loaded spares. No additional Lightnings remained. Drivers were assigned and loading was completed, then the dead were carefully placed inside the Saladin and sealed in to keep them from predators and vultures. The driver’s viewport was shuttered and covered with rocks. The survivors said a silent prayer, shot a few more zoms when they were done, got on the trucks, and drove back the way they came.

An hour after sundown, the three-truck convoy broke out of the rough terrain south of Kingman and exited on an overgrown gravel road. The search for a way through the hills had been a success. The men gave a ragged cheer as they proceeded toward the Interstate a few miles away.

Mackenzie rode in the gasoline tanker as the gunner, between the other two trucks. Freeman was assigned to the tank-hauling tractor-trailer. The uninjured private drove the tanker. Mackenzie stood up in the tractor’s hatch by the .60-caliber machine gun and enjoyed having the wind in his face again as he had in the Saladin. He was still puzzled by the absence of so many zoms from Kingman. Survivors could have walked out of town to the north along U.S. 93, which went straight to Las Vegas, but why? The zoms clearly had not gone east, or else the convoy would have run into them that morning. Mackenzie picked up the binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck and scanned the southern horizon. No dust clouds, like a horde of zoms might make. No doubt many had perished in the firestorm, as zoms were not noted for their common sense. Many could have burned up just be being pushed into the flames, as had happened during the previous night’s attack. It was a mystery.

He swung to face north and scan the low hills there. The breath caught in his throat. A low dust cloud was visible in the twilight. The surviving zoms were on the march, heading northwest toward Vegas. Someone was sending them there. What the hell was going on? What could have—

He froze, then began searching for the tiny light he was sure he had seen. He gasped when he saw it again. It was barely visible, a red light that flashed on and off, on and off, far to the north.

Desert wilderness, 10 miles southwest of Kingman,
Former state of Arizona
Friday evening, September 3, 1999

Mackenzie dropped through the hatch into the tractor cab and grabbed the radio mike, startling the driver. He banged his left arm on the side of the hatch hard enough to gasp aloud, but tried to ignore it. “Condor high north, condor high north!” he cried.

“Wolf Pack, blackout! Dead stop!” the Old Man immediately responded. “Blackout! Dead stop!”

The convoy came to a swift halt. Headlights, spotlights, and truck engines were shut off; darkness and silence reigned. Mackenzie dropped the mike on the seat and stood up again in the hatch. There he raised the binoculars in his right hand and searched the northern sky for that tiny red light. Boots crunched gravel as someone ran to his truck.

“There was a red—there! It’s still there!” Mackenzie lowered his binoculars and pointed. “The light’s above the horizon, just to the left of that peak, and it’s moving. I think I saw zoms out there, too. There’s a long dust cloud on the ground below the light. It’s hard to make out.”

The general scanned the area northward with his own binoculars. “I see it,” he said, then turned and shouted, “Sergeant Freeman!”

“Hour and a half, maybe, if we kick it,” the Old Man muttered. He turned to Mackenzie’s truck. “I need to get up there,” he snapped. Mackenzie obligingly got back inside the cab and climbed out the passenger door to let General Armalin get in. In moments the Old Man stood atop the cab roof, studying the scene to the north. “That’s a light plane,” he said at last. “Sergeant Freeman, is there a road other than this one going straight west out of Kingman?”

There was a pause as Freeman checked a map with a dim red penlight. “Arizona State Route 68 goes west into the Black Mountains, sir. It’s about, mmm, five miles northwest of us.”

“That’s about right. It looks like that’s where the zoms are going, the ones who made it through last night. Still looks like a hell of a lot of them.”

“Uh, sir, 68 goes on through the Black Mountains to Bullhead City on the other side,” Freeman continued. “That’s right on the Colorado River. There’s a bridge crossing the river there, and another road, 163, continues west to U.S. 95. That’s the road we’d planned to use to get to Vegas after crossing the Colorado at Topock.”

“Huh,” said the Old Man, still looking through the binoculars. “You think someone knows we’re here?”

“Shit, man, don’t ask me, I don’t know anything,” said Freeman. “If Jesus showed up in a swim suit I’d be the last one to know.”

“That was a rhetorical question, sergeant. It wasn’t meant to be answered.”

“I know what ‘rhetorical’ means,” Freeman grumbled under his breath. “Did I leave my stupid face on this morning or—”

“We should be able to beat the zoms across the Colorado to 95,” the general interrupted. “Zoms walk at about five miles an hour. If those zoms had been running, they’d be out of sight by now.” Without warning, the Old Man jumped down from the tractor roof and landed in a crouch before standing again. It raised startled eyebrows among those who saw him do it. “Let’s go for the Interstate, but run dark and keep radio silence unless there's an emergency.”

“I’d like to think Austin would warn us if it were, but they’ve been preoccupied with little things like palace revolutions. It’s still possible. I’d hate to think that plane was actually leading the zoms anywhere.”

The Old Man detailed Mackenzie and two other men to keep watching the light while the convoy trucks started their engines and continued west toward the freeway. Two men were assigned to monitor the radios in case the aircraft tried to communicate with them. The way was not as difficult as negotiating a trail through the hills behind them, but it was a challenge nonetheless. Railroad tracks had to be crossed before the highway was reached, but once they reached the asphalt it was smooth driving. The trucks turned southward and gained speed. The quarter moon illuminated the road, but it was dangerous to go above 25 mph, thanks to occasional wrecked cars and old flood debris.

Mackenzie scowled as he watched the blinking red light. It seemed a little brighter now and had risen against the sky. He got down into the cab and picked up the radio mike again. “Need confirmation, condor approach,” he said, then waited.

Once again the trucks rumbled to a halt and fell silent. Mackenzie got out and peered up at the sky, searching for the aircraft. This time he saw it without the binoculars. It was unquestionably closer.

“Don’t fire on it!” bawled the general, jogging back from the lead vehicle. “Take cover! Take cover! Get out of the tanker and head for the other vehicles! Sergeant Foster, get my rifle!”

Mackenzie withdrew as ordered and walked back to crouch behind the tank-hauling tractor-trailer. He continued to watch the plane draw nearer.

“General!” called a private. “We’re getting a transmission on five hundred kilohertz!”

“It’s a woman,” said the private as he handed over the headphones and mike, “but I don’t think it’s Daria.”

The Old Man took only the mike. “Put it on speakers.” The private nodded, leaned inside the truck cab, and flipped a switch.

“—made it out of Kingman,” came Jodie Landon’s voice from the radio. “I hardly believe it, but a little birdie told me you did. We made an estimate of two million zombies in town the day before you got there. That was a surprise. Did you send out invitations for them to meet you there, or did you crash their party? That was strange, all right. I thought for a while I was rid of you, but… it appears that is not the case.”

There was a pause before she went on. “Are you just going to listen to me, or are you going to make conversation like real gentlemen? Maybe you’re waiting for that zombie girl to send you a secret message in Morse code. Wouldn’t that be exciting? I haven’t heard from her in a while, though. Maybe she remembered she was a zombie and couldn’t do that. Too bad. You’ll have to bone some other white zombie girl. There are still millions of them around. Catch one, tie her down, and go to it. Does white feel right to you?”

“Hello, hello, anyone listening?” Jodie’s voice took on a sultry tone. “General Armalin, are you there? You should have taken me up on my offer last week, Kyle. I was legal two years ago by Texas law, but I was burning it up long before then. We could have had ourselves a time. We had so much to talk about, so much to do—” Her tone became petulant, then venomous “—but no. I practically put it in your face, right out there for God and the world to see, but you told me—wait, how did that go—you said you wouldn’t piss in my mouth if my head was on fire, and you called me… you called me an ignorant mongoloid slut. Oh, I did not like that. That stung. You did not just call me a slut, oh no, slut by itself was too nice for you, you had to be particular. You called me an ignorant mongoloid slut. General Armalin… Kyle… can I call you Kyle?... I did not like that all.”

The general stood with his hands on his hips and sighed as he looked at the ground. Mackenzie and the other soldiers stared at him in shock. Jodie, who had set up the ambush that killed so many of the force, had tried to seduce and recruit the Old Man, too?

“Well, Old Man—I can only guess why they call you that—I know the reason you don’t like to fuck ignorant mongoloids like myself. Uh-huh. You and your men are out there humping each other in the desert tonight to keep warm, because you and that boy-scout lieutenant and all the rest of your men are a bunch of fagland candy-ass fairies.”

“Shut up!” said Mackenzie, the Old Man, and four other soldiers at the same time.

Sergeant Foster ran up carrying a long, narrow case. The Old Man put down the mike, then knelt on the ground and unlocked the case. It was hard to see what he was doing, but Mackenzie heard the general pick up metallic items and assemble them with great rapidity. What kind of rifle was this? What was he going to do?

Mackenzie looked up. From the brightness and speed of the blinking red light, he guessed the airplane was a mile away and closing quickly. “Heads up,” he said as he pulled out his .357. Other men went for their weapons as well.

“Hold your fire!” snapped the Old Man, twisting two pieces of metal pipe together. “Don’t waste ammo!”

“Back again,” said the sultry voice on the radio. “Come on, fellas, I know you’re out there. Don’t play games. My little birdie can see you really well. He says you’ve got your vehicle lights out, but that’s no good against starlight scopes and infrared cameras. My little birdie can see those hot little engines cooling off on the highway. He can probably see your hot little motors pounding away at each other’s asses, too. Mmm, mmm. So you really think I’m stupid, right, General? My, my, my. You think I’m stupid, and that’s why you didn’t want me.”

The Old Man stood and walked around the tractor-trailer until he was in the open. “Stay back and hold your fire!” he shouted. He lifted the rifle and aimed, turning in place as he tracked the blinking red light. Mackenzie squinted, trying to make out the weapon. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was sure as hell big, for one thing.

“It’s a sad day for Texas, I tell you,” Jodie continued, “when an ignorant little mongoloid slut like me can’t get a one-inch rise out of—”

Mackenzie heard the loud crack of a large-caliber bullet going supersonic, followed a second later by another echoing shot. The Old Man continued to track the aircraft, waiting.

The red blinking light wobbled in the sky. Yellow flames suddenly spewed from a point ahead of the red light.

“—a parade full of prancing queens like you. What’s the matter? Cat got your… what?” Jodie’s voice changed and became distant. “What happened?”

A long stream of burning fuel stretched across the night sky like a comet, engulfing the blinking red light. The comet began to drop rapidly.

There was a general rush among the onlookers to get back behind the lead and rear trucks, staying well away from the gasoline tanker. The small airplane, however, nosed into the desert several hundred yards away to the west. A stupendous orange fireball billowed upward, then flaming debris rained down in all directions. A deafening explosion arrived seconds later as black smoke and flames shrouded the crash site.

Soldiers whooped and cheered and shouted. The Old Man lowered the strange rifle and scanned the sky to the north.

“Oh, you motherfuckers,” hissed the voice on the radio. “You should not have done that.”

“Get in the trucks!” General Armalin roared, heading for the lead vehicle with his rifle. “Move! Lights on, fast as we can go! Get moving south, we’re wasting time!”

“You do not know what you just did,” Jodie snarled on every truck radio. “You have no idea just how much that pissed… me… off.”

Tractor engines thundered to life. Doors slammed. High-beam headlights and spotlights came on, throwing the terrain ahead into high relief. The convoy began moving. Trucks shifted gears as they accelerated.

“But you’re about to find out,” Jodie finished in a loud whisper. Static followed.

Mackenzie was back in the gasoline tanker’s tractor, searching the northern skies for another plane. The tractor was moving quickly, and the expressway ride was bumpier than he had expected. He hoped the driver wouldn’t screw up and rear-end the trailer ahead. After the plane crash, he was intensely aware of how vulnerable his vehicle and its cargo were, and what the immediate effects of an explosion would be. There wouldn’t be enough left of him to feed a cockroach. With any luck, it would happen quickly—but that wasn’t how real life went.

Jodie’s last words made him nervous. She was the kind of psycho who was capable of anything. She was probably getting another little plane ready, maybe one with a machine gun or two on it to strafe a few trucks and men. They would have to break out the Landon Lightnings and fill the sky with steel to keep from—

Mackenzie forgot his train of thought. In the binoculars’ viewing field, a light appeared low in the sky to the north. It wasn’t a flashing pinpoint light. It was a long, thin flame pointing upward, a flame that flickered slightly and had an orange cast to it. Below the flame was a faint contrail of smoke leading down to the mountains on the horizon.

Mackenzie was back in the cab and had the mike to his mouth before he knew it. “Missile!” he shouted. “Missile launch to the north!”

“Dead stop!” roared the general. “Separate and scatter! Abandon the vehicles!”

Brakes screamed. The cargo trailer ahead of the gas tanker began to slide into a jackknife. Mackenzie heard the Old Man shout something else on the radio, but he wasn’t paying attention. The tanker driver jerked the wheel to the left to avoid hitting the trailer, but there wasn’t room and he drove off the road. The tractor dropped and slammed into the rocky soil, rebounding hard and blowing a tire. More tires exploded when the rear of the tanker trailer left the highway and hit the desert ground. Shouting no no no, the driver fought to keep the vehicle from rolling over as it swayed and jumped. A huge gully, yards deep and wide, appeared in the headlights before them. Mackenzie braced himself against the dashboard, steeling for the inevitable crash as the tanker lurched forward with brakes squealing, the tanker’s steel frame groaning as only twisting metal can, then—

They stopped. The tractor’s front left tire hung just over the edge of the wash, tilting the cab so that the driver sat lower than Mackenzie. Without so much as a word or a backward glance, the driver shut off the engine, flung open his door, jumped out, and was gone. Mackenzie jumped out on his side a second later, but he landed wrong and fell on a rock that punched him hard in the right side, knocking out his wind. He rolled over and fell down into the dry gulley where he lay gasping in agony and barely able to breathe. He tried to get to his feet and run from the tanker, but the best he could do was to crawl out of the ditch.

The general kept yelling something in the background. Mackenzie could hear him even through the massive noise in his head from the pain he was in. It sounded like the Old Man was yelling about a hammer blowing—no, he said hammer blow. Hammer blow, take cover.

Nah, Mackenzie thought in a daze, she wouldn’t do that. Jodie wouldn’t do that, no way. The Old Man had it wrong, hot line to God regardless. Not even Jodie couldn’t pull that one off.

Mackenzie found he was too tired to go any farther. Fine, sure, hammer blow, duck and cover, what the fuck, he could do that. He needed the rest anyway. With great care he tried to lie face down on the hard soil without putting pressure on his broken arm. It was unreal how much his side hurt. The pain went all the way through him. He felt like he was about to vomit.

Hammer blow, the general kept yelling. Get down, take cover. He was really screaming it out. Hammer blow. Mackenzie closed his eyes. Where in the hell would Jodie get a—

The Light went through his eyelids and through his retinas and through his optic nerves into his brain and he screamed incoherently. The Light grew brighter and more terrible in an instant, then brighter, then brighter still. Mackenzie found he could see through his eyelids, see stones on the ground in front of him in stark black and white. It grew hot in the Brightness, intolerable blistering hot. He feared his clothes and hair had caught fire. Men pleaded for Jesus to come save them, hollered that they were blind, cried out for mothers and angels and medics. Their screams sounded like whispers in a vast cathedral in which the universe held its breath and waited.

The ground then rumbled beneath him in a one-second earthquake, throwing up clouds of dust that enveloped and choked him. Afterimages of the ground by his face hovered before his closed eyes.

He opened his eyes. He saw great ridges and mountains miles away with perfect clarity. The Light was rising as it grew dimmer; its movement upward was obvious from the way the shadows around him shrank. He turned and looked back without thinking. The Light was far above but not directly over him, lifting heavenward. It was still stupendous, a yellow-orange sun of living, rolling flame atop a fat column of smoke. Mackenzie saw it, then—

—looked down at what lay below the Light. He then discovered he had done what Lot’s wife had done when she looked back at the hellfire consuming Sodom and Gomorrah. In moments he would pay for that error as fatally as had she. The shockwave was coming at him faster than a freight train, a monstrous expanding halo of dust, smoke, and rock flying over the ground from a pillar of boiling clouds that climbed skyward at tremendous speed. He rolled over with his back to the blast, curled up, and shut his eyes. For his incaution, God struck him a savage blow that knocked the air from his lungs and consciousness from his brain.

He came to choking on a mouth full of grit. He could not hear himself think over the thunderclap that beat around him without end. A hurricane howled and tore at his clothes. Dust hurled by so fast and thick he did not dare open his eyes. The hurricane abruptly slowed and died, then went into full reverse and howled in the other direction, flinging dust over him a second time. He dug his fingers into the ground to keep the wind from dragging him away. He yelled, but he could not even hear his own voice.

When he did open his eyes, coughing until he thought he would hack up a lung, he could barely see through the blowing clouds of dust. All light was gone except for a red glow where great flames licked skyward, far away where the blast had occurred. He could not tell how far ground zero had been, though he knew it was terribly important to find out so he knew how much longer he had to live. Loud metallic bangs and deep thumps rang out around him. Falling blast debris, he thought, but did not take cover. He did not hear any of the other men as he got to his feet. He could easily imagine he was the only one left alive. Hadn’t he once thought this might happen?

Trembling and in shock, he surveyed his surroundings as the wind died and the haze of dust thinned. In the distant red firelight he saw the tanker standing upright just fifty feet away. It had lost three tires, one of them on the tractor. All the window glass was blown out. The light gray paint on the rear of the tanker, facing the direction of the blast, appeared to be smoldering. He stumbled toward the truck, thinking he should put out any fires to prevent another explosion, but no flames were visible. The tires were smoking as well. He scooped dirt into his right hand, flung it at the rear of the tanker, then noticed his left arm dangling at his side. The sling was gone. That’s not good, he thought, but preventing a fire on the tanker struck him as more important. The arm could wait.

The tanker driver, a private whose name Mackenzie realized he had once more forgotten, ran up and shouted something about Mackenzie’s arm. It was hard to hear, but Mackenzie nodded, not understanding and not caring, and motioned for the man to help throw dirt on the smoking tires. The private got the message and did so. He still did not appear injured. Lucky son of a bitch, Mackenzie thought. As he continued his efforts, he began to feel an intense pain in his right side. His left arm was similarly aching. He threw dirt at the end of the tanker until he was exhausted and hurting too much to continue. Panting hard, he leaned against the warm rear bumper and spat out bits of dirt and stone.

From where he stood, Mackenzie could see the flatbed trailer and its tractor about fifty yards back. The driver had prevented the vehicle from jackknifing, though the vehicle now rested sideways, half on the road and half off. Crates full of cargo had been shaken loose from the flatbed and had crashed on the road, spilling their contents everywhere. Two of the Lightnings on the trailer were badly damaged, leaving six. At least they hadn’t exploded.

It then struck Mackenzie that the flatbed was closer to the bomb’s detonation point, which at this point looked to be a ground burst that fell northward, well short of the convoy but not short enough. He still could not judge the distance to ground zero and wasn’t inclined to walk over and find the distance for himself. Someone opened the driver’s door on the tractor and slowly got out. Mackenzie thought about waving to him, but he had no energy to do it. He couldn’t remember anyone’s name anyway.

He turned to look for the tank carrier. He could not tell where it was through the haze that hung everywhere. It must be much further back and closer to the blast.

Mackenzie pushed away from the tanker, ignoring calls from the driver. He made his way through the desert taking care not to fall over anything. It took forever to get to the highway, then another eternity to find the overturned tank hauler far down the road in the haze. It had jackknifed and skidded off the road, the tank and trailer crashing on their sides while the tractor rolled completely over on its roof. Something was burning toward the rear of the crash. In the light of the vast red flames leaping from the bomb's presumed crater, Mackenzie saw the tractor’s roof had been crushed down on the men inside the cab. An arm stuck out from the wreckage from the driver’s side. Nothing moved or made a sound.

Mackenzie stared dully at the wreck until he knew there was nothing more he could do. He then went over to the tank destroyer. The air stank of diesel fuel. The rear engine was on fire and was too hot to approach. He found three men dead from crash injuries, one of them the newly promoted staff sergeant. Mackenzie sat down on the ground, too tired to do anything more. The smell of diesel grew stronger. He would have to move soon, but he wasn’t ready yet.

He thought for a moment about fallout. There would be a ton of it from a ground-burst nuke, if that what it had been. He couldn’t find it within him to care. The Old Man had been right. They were all going to die. It was okay with Mackenzie, though. Everyone had known that might happen. They had known it before they left Highland. Death was acceptable for a good cause.

Except there was still one thing he had left to do. He thought about that and nodded to himself. He had one thing to do before he kicked off. He got to his feet, wincing from the throbbing in his arm and the ache in his side, then walked slowly back to the last two remaining trucks.

Finding Daria was not his last mission. He had already accepted that he would somehow accomplish that. He had come this far and still had a long way to go, but he could do it.

He was thinking instead about Jodie Landon. It was high time someone arranged a meeting between Jodie and her Maker to answer for her uncountable sins.

I-40 between Yucca and the Topock bridge
Former state of Arizona
Saturday after midnight, September 4, 1999

Mackenzie groaned in torment. The gasoline tanker had proved roadworthy after time-consuming repairs and tire changes, but with two axles slightly bent the vehicle had a noticeable wobble as it rumbled down the freeway at 35 mph. This back-and-forth motion churned up Mackenzie’s stomach on top of everything else he had been through. Still, it could have been worse. At least the nausea took his mind off his other injuries—and the current conversation.

It could have been a lot worse, he thought. I need to keep telling myself that. It could have been a lot worse. It could have been—

“You said, ‘Maybe there’s a good reason why she carries a dosimeter around with her.’ You did say that, right? And you said, ‘Hey, Psycho Bitch, you’re looking sweet as honey tonight, how about a molasses cookie?’ You were going to give that crazy bitch a cookie! A cookie!”

“What? I heard you offer that crazy bitch a molasses cookie! I heard it with my own ears!”

“Let it go? Let it go? The only reason I’m alive is because D’Angelo didn’t want to ride with Armalin anymore ‘cause he said the general was picking on him, so we switched trucks when the Old Man shot the plane down and now D’Angelo’s smeared all over the road and I’m stuck riding with you!” Freeman cleared his throat. “Not that I’m complaining about being with you, you understand. I’m just trying to make a point. That crazy bitch almost killed me!”

“No, I meant, the part about the cookie, just let it—” Shit, don’t think about the truck wreck, don’t—no, I’m gonna throw up, no please no no no no—

“I came that close—” Freeman held up his right hand, the index finger and thumb an eighth of an inch apart “—that fucking close to being smoked by a fucking A-bomb! An A-bomb! I would’ve looked like a skinned possum in a deep fryer! On top of that, D’Angelo owed me money! That lyin’ cheatin’ son of a bitch owed me—”

The deep-fried possum image did it. Mackenzie suddenly lurched to one side and stuck his head out of the open passenger window. This was easy to do as the tanker’s windshield and side windows didn’t have a scrap of glass left in them after the shockwave went over. He was grateful for that little detail. It didn’t even matter that he hit his broken arm against the door.

“Hey, are you puking on the side of my vehicle?” Freeman yelled. “You better not be puking on my vehicle, ‘cause I sure as shit am not going to be the one who cleans it up!” He subsided with an angry scowl as he squinted into the wind blowing into the cab. “D’Angelo should be the one cleaning it up. Son of a bitch owed me a hundred twenty-two dollars. A hundred and twenty-two dollars!” He pounded the steering wheel as he shouted, “See if I play poker with your motherfucking ass anymore!”

After the outburst, Freeman adjusted his driving goggles and drove for a minute in relative silence. He finally waved a hand in resignation. “Okay, look. If you gotta puke, try not to get anything on my vehicle, okay? Or get as little on it as you can, okay? Damn, I bet you got radiation poisoning. You were out in the open when that motherfucker went off. That was dumb, man. You should’ve stayed in your vehicle and got down on the floor like me, surrounded by metal and shit. It doesn’t matter that you were in the tanker. If the tanker blew, ‘least you’d’ve gone right away, not lying in bed puking all over the place for a week before you turned bald and your dong shriveled up and fell off. That’s why you’re puking, man. It’s from the radiation. Damn that crazy bitch.” He gave Mackenzie a worried glance. “Hey, man, you okay? I don’t hear you puking anymore.”

Mackenzie coughed and spit, then hung in the window with his head down and the cool dry wind blowing over him. “I’m okay,” he gasped.

“Look, I’m sorry I ragged on you, man. It’s just that I get territorial about my vehicles. Plus, I’ve been through a lot of shit in the last couple hours, you know? That bitch almost killed me!”

“I used to know a lot about that radiation poisoning,” said Freeman in a more conversational tone. “I read a lot when I was a kid. If you’re puking now, that means you took a big dose of rems or whatever. Fucked everything up. You’ll stop puking in a while, though, but then… ah… let’s talk about something else. You pick a topic. Just don’t talk about death or dying or anything, okay?”

“What? Oh, uh, maybe an hour. Damn bridge better still be there, man. On the other hand, maybe it’s better if it’s not. The general told me he thinks that crazy bitch is hold up in Vegas. Did he talk to you about that?”

“He told me she might be at this old Air Force base right next to Vegas, Nellis or something. That would be north by northwest of us, about where you saw that missile take off. He said there was probably all kind of shit there left over from the A-bomb tests forty or fifty years back. He said he thought that was the most likely place she and her mother would go. I told him, man, what the hell’s that crazy bitch want to do with a big pile of A-bombs? What’s she gonna do with all that shit? She gonna burn zoms, or what? He said no, he thinks she and her mother want to start up an empire. Can you believe that? That’s what he said. He said he thinks she wants to use that shit to start a big Texas empire and make herself or her mother the emperor—I mean empress, whatever, the overlord of the earth, all that crazy dictator shit. She could nuke Austin and set up shop in Abilene where they got all those big-ass weapons factories, then bomb out the rest of the country till everyone said ‘uncle’ and gave up. I said I can’t fucking believe that crazy bitch would go and turn her sisters and brothers back into slaves like in the old days, but then I said hold on, never mind, I believe it, there ain’t nothing that crazy bitch wouldn’t do. She shot off an A-bomb and almost fucking killed me!”

Mackenzie pulled himself back into the cab and sank into his seat, covered in cold sweat and breathing heavily.

“If you’re gotta puke again, say something, all right? Don’t puke in here, though. And don’t puke on me, whatever you do. I’m not going to clean it up if you puke on your seat. I’ll get out and let you drive while I ride on top of—fuck! What the fuck was that? Is that crazy bitch at it again?”

A brilliant white light bathed the landscape as if the sun had come up from behind the tanker. It wasn’t as dazzling as the previous attack, but the source was unmistakable. Freeman braked, careful to keep the tractor-trailer from jackknifing. By the time Mackenzie had stuck his head out of the window to look back, the light had already faded except for a glow on the northern horizon.

Mackenzie stared at the dying glow. She didn’t. She did. “I think she fired off another one.”

The truck came to a full stop with the engine running. The two men got out—Mackenzie on shaky feet, holding on to the side of the truck—and looked northward at the exact moment another blinding flare lit up earth and sky. Both men recoiled and shielded their faces.

“Ow, fuck! Fucking shit! God damn it!” Freeman yelled. “That fucking hurt!”

“I don’t think that was as bright as the other one,” said Mackenzie, risking another peek. All he could see was the afterimage of the flash. “They must have gone off way back there.”

When he could see normally again, Mackenzie raised his binoculars and searched the area where the two flashes had appeared, but he saw nothing in the cloudless sky. Freeman walked around to Mackenzie’s side of the truck. “Should we run, or what?”

“She’s not shooting anything at us, as far as I can tell. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Sure.” Mackenzie handled the binoculars over after a last look. Freeman scanned the horizon slowly, back and forth. He stopped a few moments later. “I see something.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I know you’re an officer and all, but…” He adjusted the sights, looked for a moment longer, then handed over the binoculars and pointed. “It’s not a mushroom or anything. It just looks like smoke, a long way off.”

Mackenzie focused on the object in question. It appeared to be a column of white smoke rising in the moonlight. It lacked the telltale atomic cap, but even at a distance it was impressive. “How far are we from Vegas?” he asked.

Mackenzie lowered the binoculars, then tucked them under his right arm and laboriously dug his compass from his shirt pocket. He opened it and was pleased to see it had survived the rough experiences of the last few hours intact. Holding the compass in the numb fingers of his bandaged left arm, he got out a penlight and took a reading on the direction of the distant cloud. He looked for Freeman and noticed the Old Man’s flatbed had halted on the highway about a half-mile ahead of them with its lights on, waiting for them to catch up.

“Here,” said Freeman, coming back. “Vegas is about a hundred miles north-northwest, give or take. I’m not sure exactly where we are on I-40, down around here somewhere.”

Mackenzie took more readings with the compass and binoculars as Freeman plotted the results on the map with a pencil stub.

“Not quite Vegas,” said Freeman at last. “Definitely along that line but a little east, almost straight north unless we got it wrong. What the hell’d she do, blow up the goddamn city? Commit suicide? Nah, we’d never be that lucky.”

Mackenzie frowned, staring at the cloud. He wished he could remember enough trigonometry to estimate the cloud’s height. He thought it might be a mile high. “That had to be atomic,” he said, amazed that he could say such a thing in a rational voice. “But where…”

“It should have made a mushroom by now,” said Mackenzie, staring at the spectacle. He adjusted the focus and looked again. “It kind of has a little cap on top, but—”

“What if she didn’t fire it off on land?” said Freeman, peering at the map.

Mackenzie lowered the binoculars and saw that Freeman was pointing at a spot on the map with the beam of his red penlight. The spot indicated was twenty miles east of Las Vegas.

“You crazy motherfucking bitch,” Freeman whispered, then he bolted around the front of the vehicle. Mackenzie threw the binoculars and penlight on the floor of the passenger side and vaulted in. He slammed his door as Freeman threw the tractor into gear and took off with tires shrieking.

“How long have we got?” Freeman screamed, giving the engine all the gas he could.

“I don’t know!” Mackenzie screamed back. It was impossible not to scream. He grabbed the radio microphone and turned it on. Wild squealing static rang out. “Shit!” he yelled and hammered the radio with his fist. “Work, damn you, work!”

Freeman tried to look behind the vehicle using the outside mirror, but the earlier blast had torn the whole thing away. “Are we on high enough ground, do you think?”

“I don’t know!” Mackenzie tried the radio anyway, skipping normal protocol. “She blew up Hoover Dam!” he shouted at the mike. “She blew up Hoover Dam with two nukes! Get the fuck on the road and go!”

More earsplitting squeals and howls came from the speakers. Discovering the radio was not properly tuned, Mackenzie turned the volume down, cursing nonstop, then dialed the frequency back to 500 kHz. He knew atomic weapons could blow out electronic devices, but most of the radio equipment used by the Texas army was older than that, more easily repairable and less affected by huge electromagnetic pulses. The ionosphere, however, was another matter entirely. Even a small nuke could shut down radio and TV communications for hours or days. “General!” he said to the mike. “She blew up Hoover Dam, do you read me?”

Mackenzie looked through the glassless windshield. The Old Man’s tractor-trailer was moving again, its tires kicking up a cloud of dust. He thought he heard the truck backfire.

“I think they got it,” said Freeman. “Look at the map and see if we’re high enough!”

“Give me some time!” Mackenzie snapped. The tractor cab rocked from the axle problems, but he could tolerate it now. He got the map from the floor, found his penlight, and hunched over as he worked to keep the map from blowing away. Not having a second hand made everything complicated. “Did you see a town or something around here so I can tell where we are?”

“Yucca! We’re just north of Yucca! We passed a sign for it back at the last interchange!”

“Tell me if you see a landmark!” Mackenzie began to plot where they were with relation to the Colorado River to their west. Though they were descending in sea-level altitude as they drove south through the Sacramento Valley, they were guarded for the moment by the Black Mountains from flooding—but that would change when they reached the bridge over the Colorado at Topock and crossed into old California. Topock would surely be hit by the flood from Lake Mead, assuming most of it hadn’t been vaporized in the blast. It was just a question of which would get there first: the last two trucks of the convoy or the flood.

“Okay, good! We’re good for the moment!” At their current top speed of 35 mph, Mackenzie figured they would reach Topock in one hour, exactly as Freeman thought they would. If it wasn’t for their desperate need for gasoline, he would have voted to dump the tanker and move everything to the flatbed, taking their chances it wouldn’t break down. But if Jodie really had blown the dam—

Mackenzie gripped the map as he leaned out the window and looked back to the north. Even without the binoculars, he could see a small white column of smoke jutting above the distant mounts, illuminated by the waning moon. There was no way he could see a conventional explosion a hundred miles off, especially at night.

“You crazy bitch,” he said in awe. He pulled his head back inside the cab. Jodie Landon carried one hell of a grudge.

Mackenzie hunched over the map with the penlight again. “The dam’s about ninety to hundred miles upstream from Topock, and the change in elevation between the two isn’t that much, less than a thousand feet. Even if the wave came down at fifty miles an hour, it’d be two hours before it hit the bridge. We’ve gotta keep going, we can’t stop. We’ll have to step on it once we get to the California side, because we’ll be low in the river valley until we can get another twenty miles north and get off the Interstate so we can get behind the mountains there for cover. They should block anything from reaching us if we do that.”

“No, of course not! I don’t know what the water’s speed will be or what it’s going to look like when it comes down! All I know is we have to keep moving!”

They were silent as the tractor-trailer continued to barrel down the freeway. The flatbed was pulling away and was now far ahead. Mackenzie couldn’t blame them.

After a pause, Freeman cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I jumped in your shit a while ago. I was tense, real tense. That crazy…” He broke off.

They watched the dark land flow by. They went through two interchanges at what was left of Yucca, Arizona. Mackenzie tried the radio again, putting on the earphones and carefully listening to anything around the 500 kHz mark. After a long while he took the earphones off and dropped them on the seat. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s all messed up from the bombs.”

“I can’t believe her,” said Freeman. “I can’t believe it. Her Majesty, the Empress Jodie the First, ruler of the Texas Empire. She could do it, you know.”

Freeman glanced at his companion. “What? You will? Fuck, man, you’re gonna have to stand in line behind me.”

After a time the highway swung westward, still paralleling the Black Mountains to the right. Freeman pointed to the remains of a large highway sign. “California border’s a half-hour away.”

“This Interstate thing’s held up pretty well so far. They built things to last in the old days.”

“Looks like the general really wanted to move on it. I can’t even see his taillights. Not like him to panic. He must have a reason.”

“Mmmm.” Mackenzie picked up the binoculars and studied the terrain ahead. “I don’t see him. Guess he didn’t want to wait.” He put the binoculars down again. “We’ll catch up. Just keep moving.”

“Uh,” said Freeman, “listen, man, I’m sorry what I said about you, you know, dying and everything. I get overexcited and shit sometimes. I don’t mean it.”

“Nah, seriously, I’m sorry I said that. You were lying down, so you probably didn’t get as big a—”

“I don’t care if I die. I’ve got a few things to do first, but other than that I don’t care anymore.”

After a beat, Freeman said, “Okay,” and nothing more for a while. Mackenzie looked out the window behind them. Nothing was gaining on them. He couldn’t see the white cloud pillar.

“The general,” said Freeman at last, “he… he told me about, uh, Darla, that white chick or whoever that you’re supposed to rescue.”

Mackenzie thought about it and shrugged. Maybe the Old Man wanted an ace in the hole and meant to set Freeman up to find Daria if he failed or died. “Her name’s Daria, not Darla.”

“Oh. Um… can you, like, tell me about her? I mean, if you can’t, then—”

“Sure, I can.” Mackenzie began talking. He told Freeman everything he knew, everything that had happened with the mission so far. By the time he finished, they were ten miles from the bridge.

“If she really knows anything about the Zom—that’s the issue, the key to everything—then maybe we can stop the whole thing. The Old Man thinks we can shut it down. I don’t know how, but we’re gonna do it, that’s all there is.” He took a deep breath. “This bullshit with Jodie, though—”

Mackenzie turned to look at Freeman. “I’ve got a hundred that says you won’t.”

“Okay, brother, I’ll lay a hundred down on that, because I’m gonna take out Empress Crazy Bitch before you even figure out where she put her throne room. I’ll even wait till you find Darlene to make it fair.”

They shook hands. Mackenzie settled back in his seat. He wondered why he felt better. He certainly had no reason that he knew of.

“You see any tidal wave yet?” asked Freeman, giving a swift glance behind them.

Mackenzie shook his head as he looked out the side window. “We’re still an hour ahead of it at least.”

“If you’re wrong, brother, you’re… whoa.” Freeman applied the brakes and steered to the left.

Freeman brought the tanker to a dead stop with half the truck on the left shoulder. He left the engine running and headlights on as he peered out the missing windshield. “What is that?” he breathed.

“We’re not, man.” Freeman edged the vehicle forward until they could both look out Mackenzie’s window at it. The object blocking the road looked as if it had fallen from a great height, judging from the crater it had created and the many cracks in the asphalt radiating out from the impact point.

“Hey, man, I’ve got another question.” Freeman pulled back to the driver’s side. “Where’s the other truck?”

Freeman swung the tanker around the crater and continued on at a slower speed—until Mackenzie said, “Wait, stop the truck.”

“Fuck!” Freeman braked again and shut off the motor when the tanker had completely stopped. “What now?”

Mackenzie pulled his head back in the trouble and shouted, “I don’t hear anything!”

After staring at his companion for a long moment, Freeman looked out the front window. “I don’t hear anything,” he said—then he frowned. “Wait, I don’t hear anything.”

They sat and looked out the windows for a long minute. Freeman’s right hand dropped to the floor by his feet and came up with a pistol. Mackenzie took out his .357.

They waited another minute before Freeman shoved his pistol down the front of his pants and started the tanker. “We’re getting the fuck outta here,” he said. They headed away at a cautious speed.

Mackenzie swallowed. He could not image what was going on. Had Jodie fired off another nuke or weapon this far south, or was this the result of some other aberration of man or nature? He was starting to miss the giant hyenas.

They had gone barely a half mile before they encountered another roadblock, this one more serious. They stopped the truck as they were unable to go any farther. Wordless, they examined the object ahead of them without leaving the truck. It was a railroad tank car, or two-thirds of one that had been caved in and battered by unimaginable forces. It appeared to have rolled onto the highway. Rocks and machine parts were scattered everywhere.

“It’s been there a while,” said Mackenzie. “Look at all that rust. Jesus Christ. Look at the lettering on that side. Looks like… propane. It was propane. Damn.”

“Where’s the general?” said Freeman. He turned in his seat to look out the rear window and all around. “Something's wrong. He should’ve been here by now.”

“He couldn’t have gotten past that, and I sure as hell didn’t see any truck on the way here.”

Freeman struck the steering wheel with his fist. “Fucking Twilight Zone! I hate this shit!”

“Maybe they drove across the median and got in the eastbound lanes,” said Mackenzie. “I bet that’s what they did. They couldn’t go around it here, so they… went around it there.”

Freeman bit his lower lip, then threw the truck in gear again. “We don’t have time for this,” he said. “We gotta drive across the river before we end up swimming across.”

As they pressed on they began to pass more wreckage, almost all of it recognizable as coming from old railroad cars: wheel assemblies, doors from boxcars, smashed steel drums, coal, corroding steel drums, unrecognizable metal parts, and more damaged steel drums. Freeman guided the truck around the remains as best he could. Most of the drums had once been painted a dull light gray, but some were red, some green, and some so badly burned or mangled it was impossible to say what they had been. Mackenzie noticed lettering stenciled on some, but was not able to read it.

Mackenzie rustled a map, squinting at it with his penlight. “There’s a railroad track to the right. Train must’ve derailed and blown up right after the Zom.”

“The Interstate lanes are merging,” said Freeman. “We must be close to the bridge. Shit.” He braked again, then eased the tanker around an unrecognizable pile of wreckage. “They’re gone, man, the general and the other guys. I can’t see any tracks around. They never got here.”

The eastbound and westbound lanes merged with a concrete barrier between the two. A hundred feet farther on, Freeman stopped the truck and stared at the scene illuminated in the headlights.

The road ahead had been both battered and swept clean by an enormous force in the distant past. The asphalt was shattered in uncountable places. Even the heavy barrier between the lanes had been carried away. Blackened scraps of metal were everywhere. Mackenzie wiped his face with the back of his right hand, still clutching his .357.

“We’re gonna blow a tire if we run over that,” muttered Freeman, pointing ahead as he sat hunched over the steering wheel. “We gotta move it.”

“Don’t get out of the truck,” said Mackenzie. “I think this whole area’s contaminated with something.”

“Leaving. Just be careful. Keep going.” He glanced at his wristwatch, which he had been doing with increasing frequency. “We’ve got maybe forty minutes, maybe longer if the flood’s slower than I thought.”

Freeman gripped the wheel and took a deep breath as he put the truck into gear. The tires crunched over small debris as the truck rolled forward. Part of a ripped-open steel drum appeared ahead, half-sunk in a huge crater in the eastbound lanes. Part of the writing on the side was still legible as they drove by.

“I can’t read the chemical name,” said Freeman, turning his attention back to the road. “It says ‘herbicide’ and ‘poisonous,’ but that’s all I can see.”

Mackenzie gave a long look at an identical barrel as it went by on his side of the truck. “Something… dee… die… oxin. Never heard of it.”

“That stuff was called something-something-dioxin. D-I-O-X-I-N. It had 'poisonous waste' written below that.”

“Whatever it was, it killed every single fucking thing in… what’s that noise?” He took his foot off the gas, and the engine’s rumble grew quieter.

“No, wait! Wait, it’s the river! Oh, Jesus Christ, that scared the living hell out of me! That’s the river! It’s okay, it’s right ahead of us!” Mackenzie began laughing in hysterical relief. “It’s the Colorado River!”

“That wasn’t funny, man!” Freeman shouted. “I almost went in my pants!”

“I don’t know! Keep going!” Mackenzie struggled to keep from laughing again. He felt he was losing control of himself. There had been too many shocks in too short a time.

“I can’t believe you think this shit is funny, man!” Freeman said, pissed as hell. “That’s just wrong! You need to get a grip on your…”

His voice died as he stared ahead with wide eyes and an open mouth. “Oh, no,” he whispered.

Mackenzie wiped tears from his eyes and glanced at Freeman, then looked at the road ahead.

I-40 bridge and the Santa Fe Railroad bridge, both at Topoc
Former states of Arizona and California
Saturday sometime after midnight, September 4, 1999

Rather than say that the bridge wasn’t there, it would be more precise to say that about ninety percent of the I-40 bridge was not only there but reasonably intact. The problem revealed in the tanker’s cracked headlights was that the easternmost hundred-foot span of the bridge had collapsed, the part closest to where Mackenzie and Freeman sat in stunned silence. The remainder of the bridge from the first pier westward was still standing.

Mackenzie attempted to turn on the truck’s spotlight to show the damage more clearly, but unlike the truck’s headlights the spotlight had not survived the overpressure from Jodie Landon’s earlier attack. That left but one option to learn more. His mouth dry with fear, he picked up a long flashlight. “Stay in here,” he said as he opened the passenger door.

“Hey, you’re not going out there!” said Freeman. “Didn’t you just tell me there’s poison all over the place?”

Mackenzie eased himself down from the cab. Debris crunched under his boots. He shut the door, turned on the flashlight, then carefully walked toward the ruins of the bridge. The night was soundless except for the dull roar of river water. The flashlight beam revealed burnt, twisted scraps of metal everywhere he looked.

At the edge of the collapsed bridge he looked down, swinging the beam back and forth. A railroad tank car lay half submerged in the rushing waters below. One end of the tank had been torn away in a long-ago explosion. Doubtless it had rocketed away from the train detonation propelled by its flaming contents, to crash through the bridge before coming to rest. He wondered if any other tank cars or barrels left intact after the disaster were still exploding from metal fatigue, corrosion, and high temperatures. This was a bad place to be—and it would get unthinkably worse in a matter of minutes.

The flashlight revealed a railroad bridge to his left at the limits of visibility, but no other river-crossing structures. If it had been daylight, he could have seen if other local bridges had survived.

“I just checked,” said Freeman in a glum tone. “There’s a gas pipeline bridge south of us, but we couldn’t drive across it. The map says the road was removed. There’s a railroad bridge just north of us about—”

Mackenzie turned and peered at the wreckage northward, to the right of the highway. “Give me a minute!” he said as he headed off.

“Hey!” shouted Freeman. “Come back! Damn it, Mackenzie! Lieutenant! Sir! What the fuck! Hey! I’m gonna leave without you, do you hear me? Damn you!”

Moving quickly, Mackenzie dodged around a telescoped boxcar once filled with fifty-five-gallon steel drums, all of them crushed together as one ugly mass in the foreshortened ruin. The flashlight revealed a sloped embankment about eight to ten feet high just ahead, badly eroded from decades of neglect. He stopped and ran the beam left and right. Only two railroad cars, a caboose and a blast-damaged boxcar, remained on the track to the left next to the bridge. On the right he saw only the burned-out chassis of a single rail car—and the beginning of an enormous crater that erased the entire embankment eastward. Swallowing, Mackenzie ran toward the shallowest slope he could see and tried to climb it without falling or letting his hands touch the ground. Despite his caution he slipped and fell halfway up on his broken left arm. He saw stars and almost fainted from the pain, but he got up moments later and continued to climb while brushing himself off with the flashlight.

At the top of the embankment he saw that two railroad tracks were present, not one. Long erosion had caused the rails and ties to sink with the embankment, warping them and making the tracks useless even without the blast damage. He aimed the light beam at the last two railroad cars, which appeared to sit on a section of track that he guessed was better buttressed from below by the eastern anchor of the railroad bridge. After he studied the separation between the innermost rails of each track, which appeared to be about eight feet apart, and between the innermost ends of the wooden ties, which looked to be about five feet, he made a mental calculation. His plan might work—but only with a grave sacrifice. He scrambled down the embankment to the truck. Freeman was still cursing at him.

“Move over!” Mackenzie shouted, running around to open the driver’s door. “Hurry!”

Freeman didn’t budge. “Are you crazy?” he yelled back. “This is my damn truck! I’m not—”

Without thinking, Mackenzie pulled the .357 from behind him and waved it in Freeman’s face, pointing the barrel at the sky. “Move the fuck over right fucking now!”

“Whoops,” said Freeman as he scooted to the passenger side. Mackenzie climbed in and stuffed the .357 in the back of his pants. Putting the tanker in reverse, he turned in the seat and backed up the rig a few inches until he heard the tanker thump against the fifth wheel connector on the back of the tractor. He threw the tractor into neutral, stamped on the parking brake, then got out of the truck again.

“Sir,” said Freeman in an uncharacteristically polite voice, “may I ask what you are doing?”

Using his good hand, Mackenzie connected the air hoses and electrical lines between the tractor and tanker, then let down the landing gear on the tanker. Every action seemed to take far too long to accomplish.

“You know, if you’re thinking of unhitching that, remember that the tanker has our entire fuel supply.” Freeman watched Mackenzie’s actions with increasing concern through the rear window. “We might need some of that fuel later. In fact, I’m sure of it. Sir, are you listening?”

With the tanker’s gear down, Mackenzie unsnapped the air and electrical lines, released a safety catch, then grabbed the handle of the release lever and snapped the kingpin of the tanker free. This done, he ran back to the cab and jumped in.

“I feel I should point out, sir,” said Freeman in a reasonable tone, “that we haven’t refueled since—”

Freeman held up his hands. “As the officer wishes. It was merely an observation, sir. There’s no need to get—”

Mackenzie threw the truck into gear and floored the accelerator. The tires spun out, flinging gravel and scrap metal behind them. At the same time he swung the tractor to the right, toward the embankment. The gasoline tank trailer stayed behind.

“Uh, sir,” said Freeman as he looked through the windshield in rising horror. “You’re—wait—you—oh, no. Oh, shit.”

The tractor roared as it picked up speed. Mackenzie aimed for the shallow part of the embankment he had climbed three minutes before.

“Oh, shit,” Freeman repeated, his eyes huge. He sank down in the seat and braced himself against the dashboard with his bare feet, covering his head with his arms. “Oh, shit! Don’t do it! No! Shit!”

The tractor hit the slope upward and threw both men forward. Mackenzie hit the steering wheel with his forehead and was almost knocked unconscious. He kept the gas pedal down as the tractor scaled the embankment and reached the top, then bounced hard when it went over the steel rails. Freeman yelped when a rear tire exploded. The truck nearly drove down the other side of the mound, but Mackenzie nailed the brakes, throwing them both forward again with less injurious results. Barely able to see through the blazing pain he felt and the clouds of dust the truck had kicked up, he turned the steering wheel to the left as far as possible with his right hand, then eased off the brake. The tractor tires spun, then caught traction and pulled the vehicle onto the tracks, jumping violently each time a tire went over a rail.

Freeman remained curled up and braced for impact in the passenger seat, reciting over and over a mantra consisting of random phrases like shit, oh Jesus, and Grandpa please help me, spoken as quickly as possible. When another rear tire exploded, Freeman began screaming the mantra at the top of his lungs.

One of the headlights broke and went out, but Mackenzie could still see the way ahead. He centered the tractor’s two front tires between the two railroad lines, driving over the ends of the innermost crossties of each. He was unable to see if the rear tires were riding on or between the inner rails as he thought they might, but the truck was moving forward nonetheless. Bone-jarring bangs and rattling combined with the din from the overworked engine to make it impossible to hear, think, or see straight, much less sit in one place without bouncing around the cab.

Bucking like a mustang, the tractor closed in on the bridge and two remaining railroad cars. As the truck came up to the boxcar with the crushed roof, Mackenzie lowered the speed of the truck and saw that the edge of the boxcar nearest him would strike the truck on the left side of the front bumper. He gritted his teeth and kept going.

The sudden impact flung both men about. The one remaining headlight on the truck burst and died. The collision was followed an instant later by a second loud bang as the boxcar slammed into the caboose behind it. For a moment it seemed the truck had been forced to a halt. Then Mackenzie heard the boxcar creak, heard the crunch of the front bumper bending and the ear-splitting squeal of metal scraping over metal, then the whole assembly began to move onto the bridge.

Mackenzie gave the engine more gas, then floored it and gripped the wheel. The motor thundered. The bumper popped as it crumpled inward. The air stank of exhaust fumes. Creaking and banging, the railroad cars continued to move backward, pushed along by the tractor at full power. Mackenzie risked a look down from his window. They were over the river, black as ink in the moonlight below the crossties. It began to look like they might make it.

With a stupendous scream, the caboose suddenly jumped and began to turn to the left in the middle of the bridge. The rear then tilted upward and the caboose went over the side. An enormous spray of water arose when it hit. The old metal-on-metal shrieking ended. Mackenzie realized the caboose had not been entirely on the tracks after all and had finally derailed. The boxcar became much easier to push along, though the rear of the boxcar was pressing into the left side of the tractor’s grill, which produced a new metal-on-metal shrieking sound much louder and closer than the previous one.

An eternity later, the damaged boxcar began to move away from the truck. Mackenzie saw it reach the western end of the bridge and keep rolling under its own momentum. Moments later, the tractor too crossed the bridge’s western anchor. Mackenzie whooped and shouted with joy, then looked to the left to find a place to drive off the railroad tracks and get back to the expressway. A slope appeared that he thought he could navigate, and he turned the wheel as he gassed up the engine. The tractor bounced violently as it left the tracks, then proceeded to bound down the two-story earthen slope less like a bucking horse and more like an angry dinosaur, brutally slamming Mackenzie and Freeman against the ceiling, doors, dashboard, and seats.

With a terrific crash, the truck struck a dirt-covered road at the bottom of the slope, blew out one more rear tire, and came to rest perfectly parallel to the old road. The engine knocked a few times, shuddered, and died.

It took a minute for Mackenzie to regain his bearings. His nausea had returned with a vengeance, he thought he had broken another bone in his left arm, and his head felt as if it were about to split open. Tears ran down his face. It was one of the best moments in his life. They had made it across. He had done it.

“Can I drive now?” whispered Freeman, huddled on the floor of the passenger side.

Mackenzie nodded, unable to speak. A battered Freeman slowly got up and helped Mackenzie scoot over—thoughtfully relieving the officer of his .357 and other personal weapons in the process—then climbed over to get into the driver’s seat again. When Mackenzie tried to lean against the side door for support, he almost fell out of the truck. The passenger door had been wrenched off its hinges during the descent, leaving that side of the cab wide open to the elements. It was a moment when Mackenzie wished that seat belts had been made mandatory, not optional, for military vehicles. He made up his mind to speak to the Old Man about that when next they met.

“Lost the map,” Freeman muttered, trying to restart the truck. “Lost the flashlight, too, and damn near everything I had except my stash. Thank the Lord I didn’t put my weed on the tanker, which by the way we are going to dearly miss about two hundred fifty miles from now when the tanks go dry.” He pushed the starter button. The engine coughed and died. “That’s not good. Sounds like it’s flooded. This bitch better start up soon or else you and I are going to be the next ones who get flooded.” He made new attempts to get the truck going. “C’mon, let’s go. C’mon. Hurry up, baby, let’s go. We gotta go. Mean ole lieutenant isn’t driving anymore, it’s your buddy Huey here, c’mon, get going. Let’s not make the poor Army guys walk home just yet. Let’s go, c’mon.”

Mackenzie groaned, desperate for anything to take his mind off his physical agonies. It was peaceful now without the truck’s roar, the rubbing metal noises, and so on. Just the running river, Freeman’s grumbling, and…

How strange. In addition to the rushing of the river, Mackenzie heard something that he had not heard since his boyhood in Houston, where his neighborhood was crossed by a double-track railroad line not unlike the one they had just driven over. He had loved to listen to the sound of long freight trains rumbling by in the night.

“There’s a train coming?” Freeman snorted as he sat back. “Man, you’re crazy as shit. You’re hallucinating. I’ve read about people like you, man. You’ve gone all schizo on me. I’m talking to the general about you. Shoving a loaded piece in my face—me, a loyal and hardworking noncommissioned officer in the God-fearing Texas Third Army who was only trying to help the poor fish-out-of-water first lieutenant. Train coming my ass, there aren’t any damn trains out…”

It did indeed sound like a train coming. A big train, still far away—but the train was getting louder and bigger and closer by the second.

The truck began to vibrate softly. Then the vibrations got a little louder and stronger.

“Oh, shit,” Freeman breathed. He pounded the starter button with his fist. The engine choked and died. “Fuck! C’mon! Start, bitch!”

Not thinking about his pain any longer, Mackenzie opened his eyes and looked out of the tractor cab. The narrow road on which the truck sat lay between two small bridges visible in the moonlight, one for the railroad bridge behind them and one for the Interstate in front of them. They were very low in elevation and very, very close to the Colorado River.

Freeman hit the starter button again and again. “Start, motherfucker, start! Start! Start now!” The engine fired, coughed repeatedly—then started up but ran unevenly. Putting the vehicle in gear, Freeman gave the engine a trickle of gas to rev it up without flooding it. The truck lurched forward, almost died, then rumbled to full life again. “Go, baby,” he said in a cold sweat as the truck rolled and picked up speed. “C’mon, go, baby, go, go go, c’mon, go go go motherfucker go go go go go go go go GO!”

Everything was shaking now. Dust fell from the Interstate bridge as the tractor rumbled beneath it, then turned to follow the road to the right, heading away from the river. The road was barely one lane wide, but it went uphill and paralleled the Interstate. Freeman screamed go as if his voice alone propelled the vehicle.

Mackenzie turned to look back. He didn’t care what happened to Lot’s wife anymore. He wanted to see what happened when the train went by. For the moment, nothing was happening, except that he could hear the train coming over the roaring of the truck’s engine. No, he thought, I can feel the train coming, right through the seat through the body and tires right down to the road. I can feel it coming. It’s almost here. The creaking and groaning of tortured steel rang through the night, mixed with metallic pops and bangs. That’s the railroad bridge, he thought. It’s going down. We were on that bridge a minute ago.

The truck swung to the right again. The narrow road had abruptly turned north toward the Interstate. They were still climbing, still gaining altitude. In the moonlight before them the dusty narrow road changed into a dusty two-lane highway that crossed I-40 on an overpass, with entrance and exit ramps leading to the Interstate on each side.

“I remember this from the map!” Freeman shouted. “We can get back on I-40 from here! We’re almost out of this place! We’re almost—SHIT!”

Freeman slammed on the brakes, almost throwing Mackenzie out of the vehicle. In the moonlight Mackenzie saw it coming as well as heard and felt it. The source of the train noise had arrived. To the right of the truck, churning blackness had swallowed the two bridges over the Colorado River, leaving nothing visible. It came westward up the freeway at a quick clip, washing over rocks and roads and hills and everything it met. If they turned right to get on the eastbound lane, they would drive right into it. If they turned left and drove the wrong way to get to the westbound lane, they would reach the Interstate at the same time the blackness reached them. Mackenzie could already hear the blackness rumbling up the narrow road behind them. So this is what it’s like to die, he thought. Amazing. Fantastic.

“SHIT!” Freeman screamed again. He floored the accelerator. The tractor coughed, caught, and lumbered onward, climbing the overpass rapidly. The road behind them disappeared into the tide of blackness. At the top of the overpass, Freeman once again nailed the brakes, skidding to a halt. Mackenzie almost fell out of the truck, but a hand grabbed his shirt and dragged him back in. As he hung for an instant in the doorway, halfway between falling and being saved, he saw the two-lane road ahead of them had also vanished into the dark chaos. The thundering flood surged under the bridge, up behind them, and to their left and right. All that was left of the old world that rose above the thundering chaos was the overpass, the truck, and the two men.

“Get on the roof!” cried Freeman. He shut off the engine, put on the emergency brake, then climbed out of the cab through the missing windshield. “Get on the roof! Hurry!”

Mackenzie, however, felt no inclination to get on the roof. Nothing hurt so long as he sat and watched the end of the world come for him. Water lapped around the truck’s tires, splashed against the overpass walls, began to climb toward the cab.

The water had a nose-burning chemical odor mixed with the aroma of rotting algae and dead fish. With a reluctant sigh, Mackenzie slowly got up and soon joined Freeman on the roof, where they sat by the .60 machine gun and watched the blackness thunder around them as far as they could see. The submerged concrete bridge trembled and rocked in the flood. Steam hissed and rose where waves two and three feet high splashed against the bottom of the overheated truck engine. Only the truck could now be seen, that and the two men sitting back to back on the roof.

Freeman sighed. They sat together under the waning moon and waited for death or the retreat of the flood, whichever came next. They had a long wait.

Needles Airport, 5 miles SSW of Needles
Former state of California
Sunday evening, September 5, 1999

Mackenzie woke up chilled and aching in every part of his body. Shivering uncontrollably, he felt around for a blanket—then realized he was lying stretched out on a blanket on a hard floor. It was too dark to see. He was inside a room, he could tell that from the faint echoes of his movements and breathing—but where was this place?

Too weak to sit up, he tried to remember how it had happened that he came here. He recalled the flood at Topock, which seemed like it had happened years ago. After the flood receded and the sun came up, he saw the landscape around the overpass had become a drowned wasteland of leafless tree limbs, crushed steel barrels, and oily pools, with a layer of gray-brown mud over all that gave off a stench worse than vomit. He had a vague memory of Freeman driving in the early morning with a grim, tight-lipped expression as they chugged through the mud-coated freeway. Things became unclear after that. His arm had hurt a lot, and he had felt like he was catching the flu. Freeman said he was leaving the Interstate to find a place for them to rest, then—nothing.

Unable to make sense of his situation, Mackenzie closed his eyes in surrender and had a strange, dreadful dream he did not later remember, though he recalled he was constantly running. The nightmare was interrupted now and then by the sense that he was being helped to a bathroom. There was also Freeman’s voice: Drink this, man. C’mon. There you go, there—oops. Damn, you’re really gone. You’re not dead, I hope. Nah, guess not. That arm looks bad. Drink this. Raise your head up. That’s it.

He woke up again with thoughts thick as lead. Though he still ached, he wasn’t cold. Dim reddish light entered the room from a window behind him. He rubbed his face with his right hand. His left arm had gone numb. With an effort, he sat up to inspect himself and his surroundings.

The dressing, splint, and sling on his wounded left arm had been changed and appeared fresh. In moments he felt the familiar pins and needles sensation begin in his left fingers. The nerves had merely fallen asleep. He felt better than he had in days, completely rested. It felt like he had been asleep since the dawn of time.

The room he inhabited was a wood-paneled office with a desk, old-fashioned chairs, numerous pictures on the walls of different small aircraft, ceiling lights (turned off or nonfunctional), and a gray blanket on the floor, on which Mackenzie was sitting. There was a half-open door nearby leading to a hallway with peeling eggshell paint on the walls. With an effort he got to his feet, but he had to lean against a wall for support when his head began to spin. The vertigo passed, and he staggered through the door and into the hall. After wandering aimlessly, he found himself in a waiting room with pictures of tropical beaches on the walls. A waist-high counter divided the room in half. Beyond the counter were desks, telephones, more pictures of small aircraft on the walls, and a large sign.

An airport? And where the hell was Needles in relation to everything else? He thought there had been a town called Needles on the roadmap, a place on the California side of the Colorado River, but hadn’t Freeman said the map had been lost?

He became dizzy again and sat down, confused. Scattered magazines on the chairs and side tables were dated back to July 1969 and showed faded pictures of long-ago astronauts walking on the Moon. He picked one up, leafed through it, put it down again. What should he do next?

A whiff of marijuana smoke entered his nostrils. When he felt he could, he got up and followed the smell. And Freeman’s faint voice.

“You want this, boy?” Freeman said, down a long corridor. “You want some of this? Let’s try it. Lid’s kind of stuck, but… Damn. Gimme a minute here, okay? I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying. Yeah, there we go. Shhh, wait a second. Shhh.”

Mackenzie pushed open a door bearing a worn sign that read: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. A dog growled. Mackenzie stopped and dully looked down. It was a bone-thin, short-haired dog of indeterminate parentage, yellow with a white chest. Knee high at the shoulders, it stood by Freeman’s bare feet. An open jar full of dried meat was in Freeman’s left hand. He was tucking away a pistol with his right. The dog looked up at Freeman, then looked at Mackenzie with its ears pricked and wagged its tail.

“Hey,” said Freeman. “Good to see you walking again. Want some dinner?” He wore only a pair of fatigue pants with a long cord for a belt. He stood by a wall of shelves on which sat row after row of glass jars. Every one of them appeared to be filled with edible food.

Mackenzie blinked at the jars in astonishment, then looked down at the dog again. It kept wagging its tail. “What time is it?” said Mackenzie.

“Sun just went down, that’s all I know,” said Freeman. He picked a strip of dried meat from the jar and handed it to Mackenzie. “It’s venison, deer meat. Pretty good flavoring. Kind of chewy, though, and it gets in your teeth.”

Mackenzie took the meat but only stared at it. His stomach growled, and he swallowed. “How old is this stuff? We can’t eat anything that was canned or bottled from before the Zom, or anything in the wild, so—”

Freeman turned the jar in his hand so he could read the small label. “Nineteen ninety-seven,” he read. “Fresh enough, I guess. I’ve been eating this stuff for two days now, hasn’t killed me yet.”

“Sunday, I think. Almost sundown. You’ve been out since yesterday morning.”

Mackenzie turned back to the shelves and rows of jars. “That can’t be right.”

Freeman rolled his eyes as he held up the jar for Mackenzie to read. The small typed label read:

The dog whined. It now stood at Mackenzie’s feet, its meaningful gaze moving rapidly from the venison in his hand to his face and back again.

“United States Combined Armed Forces?” said Mackenzie. He shook his head in disbelief. “How the hell did…?”

Freeman picked two more jars from the shelves, then motioned toward the door. “You don’t look too steady, so let’s go have a seat in the lounge and I’ll fill you in. Don’t step on Spike.”

“You know what a dog is, right? C’mon.” Freeman led the group back to the waiting room Mackenzie had visited minutes earlier. There, Spike managed to steal the venison strip from the lieutenant’s careless fingers. The dog then hid under a chair while the venison was consumed in contentment.

Freeman took his time as he described his adventures after Mackenzie passed out. He tossed venison strips to Spike while he and Mackenzie ate preserved beef stew and sliced, cooked carrots straight from the jars, using their fingers. Leaving out various digressions and asides to Spike, the short form of Freeman’s story went so:

Getting off the overpass was the least of Freeman’s troubles. The flood had come upon the Interstate in numerous places where creeks feeding into the Colorado suddenly backed up with vast amounts of muddy water that had formerly been in Lake Mead, as well as in several other major lakes stretching south to Topock along the river. Driving had been treacherous with the road made so slick in places. Worse, it became apparent that the truck was leaking oil and had probably done so all night. The leak could not be fixed without access to a well-equipped garage, forcing Freeman to look for any possible place that might substitute for one. That was when he spotted a sign indicating an airport was not far away. It was serendipitous that the airport was less than a half-hour’s drive from Topock, as the oil was completely gone and the engine smoking badly by the time Freeman pulled up to the airport.

“The truck’s for shit, now,” Freeman said with his mouth full of carrots. “We can salvage the gasoline and equipment, but that’s all.”

Freeman explained. The small airfield had two runways and a half-dozen buildings, of which the largest was the one they presently inhabited. The airport had been built for civilian pilots flying very small aircraft. There was no control tower, only rooms for pilots to plot their courses before taking off, but there was a long hangar for storing planes with an attached workshop for repairs. Fuel and oil were available. As a bonus, the airport had more than aircraft in storage: it had cars, six of them, with two in excellent running condition.

There was one unusual detail about the airport, however: each building had recently manufactured locks on its doors, locked that had the letters USCAF etched into them. “They didn’t hold up to a crowbar, of course,” said Freeman. He threw another venison strip to Spike. “I think they were put there just to keep out zoms.”

“I’d agree, but as far as I can tell they’re the ones who stocked this place. They come back here sometimes, too. I found some log books with entries dated as recently as early August. I can’t find anything telling where these United States folks are coming from, though. I think they fly in.”

Mackenzie could hardly believe it. “Are the United States guys black or white?”

Freeman laughed. “Damn, man, you can’t tell that shit from handwriting! Where’d you go to school?”

Mackenzie groaned. “I meant, there aren’t any pictures of them around, are there?”

“Oh, I get it. Nah, not a one. I figure they got to be black, though. Light-skinned and albino kids are always stillborn, and nobody I’ve ever heard of can get around that. We’ve got ourselves a black planet, except maybe for Darla—”

“Whatever. Anyway, there’s no way they can be white. The devil’s got to have his due. Here, boy. Catch! Good dog!”

Mackenzie looked at Spike, who was gnawing away at another venison strip. He thought sadly of Rascal. “Where’d he come from?”

“Our new buddy wandered by yesterday. I figure he must’ve been someone’s pet. No collar or anything. He wasn’t afraid of me, just walked right up and looked as sad as you please, trembling and all. I think it was an act. He looks better now, but he needs more flesh on him. Oh, almost forgot, it’s about time you took your medicine. Go in the storage room where you found me and look behind the door. I put the antibiotics on top of the first-aid box. Take one pill in the morning and one at night, with water.”

“Stuff’s really been working on you, it looks like. Whoever these United States people are, they make good drugs. Wonder if they grow pot, too. I don’t know why we haven’t met them before. Doesn’t make sense, but what does these days?”

Mackenzie left to get his medicine. The first-aid box was filled with pills, ointments, and bandages. It looked as good as anything Texas could produce. When he returned, Freeman continued his story. Of the airport’s vehicles, he had picked out for his own use a restored 1955 Chevrolet two-door. The primer-gray car had a top speed of 140 mph, though Freeman doubted they would get close to that with the highways in such bad shape.

“It’s outfitted like a hot rod,” said Freeman with a sigh. “Damnedest thing I ever saw. Good tires, runs great. I took it out for a spin down the runways. It’s a honey. I’ve been putting stuff in the trunk for when we leave—gas cans, food jars, some of the medicine, shitload of guns and ammo—most of it theirs, some of it ours. Found a bottle of that potassium iodide, too, which I figure we already need. Damn, should’ve had you take one of those, too. I can take out the truck’s radio and put it in the backseat of the Chevy so whoever’s riding shotgun can work the airwaves. Soon as you feel up to it, we should get moving.”

“Yeah, but I found new ones here. I think they’re recent, too. Also found some aerial photos that are definitely recent. Whoever these people are, they got a hell of a lot of airplanes and a lot of time to kill using them. Oh, yeah, forgot about the briefcase. I wanted to tell you about the briefcase, too.”

“The one I found in that vehicle with the dead Landon Armaments guys. I broke the lock off. They were hunting for A-bombs, like we thought. Those two were heading for Nellis Air Force Base, where the Old Man thought the Landons went. Either Andrew or Michele found some pre-Zom documents showing Nellis was used for atomic weapons storage, some depot or whatever called Area Two. They were going to swing south after that to an old missile base by Tucson where a shitload of bombs and aircraft were stored, maybe pick up some samples. The Landons have been one step ahead of everyone the whole time. Christ and Mohammad only know what kind of shit they’ve gotten their hands on. That crazy bitch fired off three of them, bam bam bam, just like that. I don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do about that. Gotta do something.”

“Agreed, but they didn’t leave any radios here for some reason. The one in the truck probably works, but I haven’t tried it yet. Kind of wanted to get things together here first.”

“We could see if Jodie’s transmitting, too. Maybe the ionosphere’s calmed down from the nukes.”

“Beats the shit out of me.” Freeman pulled a hand-rolled joint from a pants pocket, then lit it with a small butane lighter.

Mackenzie stared, as he hadn’t seen a real butane lighter in ages. “You find that here, too?” he asked, pointing.

Freeman took a long drag, then took the jay from his mouth and exhaled smoke. “Yep. They even left tobacco cigarettes, but lucky for them I don’t like tobacco. I smoke weed for my health.”

“Same thing. Listen, why don’t you take a shower. You smell pretty bad. Shower’s right down the hall through the door, then turn left. We’ve got running water, believe it or not. Don’t use up all the soap.”

“I thought I was the one giving orders around here,” said Mackenzie with a rueful grin.

“Give some orders, then, but take a shower first. They’ve got uniforms in there, too, all sizes. Clean ones.” Freeman blew out a cloud of smoke as he picked a thread from his pants. “Comfortable, too.”

“A shower would be good about now. See you in a while.” An unsteady Mackenzie got to his feet and made his way to the hall.

“Oh, sir?” called Freeman from the waiting room. “Sorry that I called you ‘sir,’ but I had an idea for a new route to get to what’s-her-name, seeing as how Vegas might be a little hot right now, so to speak.”

“A shower’ll do that, all right. We don’t have any hot water, it’s all cold.”

A half-hour later, wearing new fatigues, socks, boots, and underwear, Mackenzie left the locker room by the showers and went looking for Freeman. He found the sergeant asleep on a long sofa in the waiting room with Spike curled up next to him. Spike gave Mackenzie a brief look, then yawned. Mackenzie smiled, though it was unexpectedly painful to do so, then he waved goodbye and left the room.

After exploring the building a while longer, he went outside and found the tractor truck. It reeked to high heaven, but he forced himself to check out the vehicle despite the stench. Freeman had done a thorough job of stripping all useful tools and other items from the truck, leaving only the radio to be removed. Wrinkling his nose, Mackenzie got into the cab anyway and turned on the radio, tuned it to 500 kHz, then settled back and waited in the darkness. For a long while he heard nothing but static. He wondered what had happened to the men on the other tractor-trailer: General Armalin, Master Sergeant Lucas, the badly burned Private Lobo, and that other private, the unhurt one who had been the tanker driver until the first atomic attack. He could not image where they had gone, or why they had left the other truck behind when they were supposed to stay together. Splitting forces in terrain this hostile was a bad idea.

He also considered sending a message to Austin, but that would immediately warn the Landons that he was alive. He and Freeman could not afford to tick them off one more time, with all the firepower she had at her disposal. He sighed and decided to listen, continuing with his mission to find Daria and learn what she knew.

At precisely ten p.m. by his watch, Mackenzie heard a brief tone from the radio’s speakers. He jumped, not knowing at first what the sound was, then checked the radio again. One minute after the first tone, a second tone sounded. Nothing was heard after that.

Code, thought Mackenzie. Someone’s out there sending messages in code. Who is it? He waited in the truck until ten-thirty, then shut off the radio in frustration and walked back to the building, making his way by moonlight. His left arm was bothering him again. Perhaps there were painkillers in the first-aid kit.

“Hands in the air!” barked a burly soldier pointing an assault rifle at him. He was barely twenty feet away. No other details about the man could be discerned.

Mackenzie merely stared at him in surprise. How the hell had he gotten so close? Was he one of the Landons’ men?

Rather than frighten Mackenzie, this succeeded in pissing him off. “Who the fuck are you?” he snapped.

“I’d do as the man asked,” came a voice from farther off in the darkness. Mackenzie heard boots moving in from all sides at a rapid pace.

“I don’t surrender to any motherfucker, period,” said Mackenzie in a loud voice, getting angrier. Landons’ men, he figured. He didn’t have a weapon on him, either. Cooperation would be the best bet, but Mackenzie was fed up with anything Landon-related. He stood his ground and glared, hoping Freeman or the dog would hear the ruckus and make their escape.

Two men came up from behind him and grasped his arms above the elbows. This produced terrific pain in his left arm, which caused Mackenzie to yell, “Ow! Son of a bitch!” He stamped down hard on one of the offending soldier's boots. More men immediately joined the struggle. Mackenzie cried out and fought back, breaking free of the other soldier’s grip and swinging wildly with his good right fist.

“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit!” shouted the man Mackenzie had not seen earlier. “Let him go! That’s an order!”

With reluctance, the soldiers subsided and stepped back from the lieutenant, keeping their weapons trained on him. One man limped, favoring his right foot, and another held his nose where Mackenzie had struck him.

The man who stopped the fight walked up to Mackenzie and stopped just out of arms’ reach. “Identify yourself,” he said.

“First Lieutenant Michael James Mackenzie, Third Texas Infantry, and fuck you!”

“Lieutenant Mackenzie,” said the man with notable restraint, “what are you doing here at one of our airfields, stealing our supplies?”

“I don’t owe Landon dogs an excuse for anything!” Mackenzie fired back. “Go to hell!”

There was a pause. “We’re not with Landon Armaments,” said the man, “but we are unfortunately familiar with them. I’m Major Oliver Harmon Jones, Junior, United States Combined Armed Forces. We got a signal that someone had broken into our airport, and we came out to investigate.”

Mackenzie felt some of his rage slip away. He took a moment to think about his response before giving it. “There is no United States anymore,” he said in a less aggravated tone. “That went down the drain with the Zom.”

“We call it the Crazy Time,” said Major Jones, “and it’s true there isn’t a United States like there once was, but we hope to change that. Why don’t we go inside and talk?”

“I don’t know that we have anything to talk about,” said Mackenzie, still edgy.

“It’s okay, lieutenant,” came a familiar voice from behind him. “A talk at this point would be in everyone’s best interests.”

“Trust me on this,” said the Old Man. “We’re in a whole new ballgame.”

Needles Airport, 5 miles SSW of Needles
Former state of California
Sunday evening, September 5, 1999

Under the watchful eye of Major Jones and almost two dozen armed USCAF soldiers, General Armalin and Lieutenant Mackenzie went back into the lamp-lit airport’s main building. A highly annoyed Sergeant Freeman (holding a struggling, yapping Spike) waited inside, having been surprised by yet more soldiers who had crept in through other doors. Freeman turned out to be correct: the USCAF troops were as dark skinned as the Texans. Their numbers included three women, an unusual sight to Mackenzie as Texas women were usually discouraged from front-line military service. The new soldiers’ fatigue uniforms were a darker green than the Texans, and they also wore ballistic chest armor and close-fitting helmets with chin straps and flip-up night-vision goggles. Their black weapons were also unfamiliar. After searching the Texans and removing anything that could possibly be used as a weapon, most of the USCAF soldiers took up posts around the outside of the building for security, with a calmer, tail-wagging Spike eventually put outside to keep them company.

Someone started up a generator in a back room. Fluorescent lights came on around the building with the rumble of power, making everyone blink. Mackenzie looked at General Armalin and got a nasty shock: the Old Man sported a bloodshot left eye, a green-black bruise and minor cuts over the left side of his face, and white bandages wrapped around his upper chest under his fatigue shirt. Mackenzie wanted to ask what happened, but the general apparently caught Mackenzie’s thought and quickly shook his head no.

“Anyone care for coffee?” asked Major Jones. He was a tall, clean-shaven man with close-cropped hair and a somewhat forced sociability. “We might be up for a while.”

“No, thanks,” General Armalin said, but he indicated the other two Texans could try it if they wished. Freeman made a face and shook his head. Mackenzie raised a hand. “Here, sir,” he said. “With a little sugar if you have any.”

“Sugar we don’t have,” said the major. “I hope honey will do instead. The general tells me Texas has plenty of sugar.”

“Yes, sir. We trade for it from the islands, Cuba and Barbados in particular.” May as well butter this guy up with all the ‘sirs’ I can muster, until I figure out what’s going on.

Mackenzie bit back a snide comment. No one he knew this evening was having any luck at all, except perhaps Jodie Landon.

The major led the way to a large conference room containing a long table surrounded by old folding chairs. The walls bore huge faded maps of the old United States and northern Mexico, with detailed views of the former U.S. states of California, Arizona, and Nevada. Major Jones took a seat at the near end of the table, placed a notepad and pencil before him, then motioned for the three Texans to sit wherever they liked. Six USCAF soldiers took up relaxed positions around the walls, their weapons aimed at the floor but capable of changing that status at a moment’s notice. General Armalin took a seat two arms’ lengths from the major. Mackenzie (with his coffee) and Freeman (with a sour expression) sat across from the Old Man, with Mackenzie the closer one to the major.

“Major Jones,” began the Old Man, “I must repeat my question about our status while in the company of you and your soldiers.”

“I wouldn’t call you prisoners or hostages, certainly,” said the major with a wave of his hand. “And I hope we will not regard each other as rivals. We’re both American-descended, after all, and we have too many common interests to be anything other than allies. Before we get into what we may accomplish together, however, we must get some desperately needed answers. I hope under the circumstances you will understand the necessity. As a gesture of good faith, and because we are short on time, we will dispense with the usual procedure of questioning individuals in separate rooms to check stories for untruths. I hope you will not give me a reason to regret that decision.”

Mackenzie looked from the major to General Armalin. The Old Man sat with his hands clasped before him on the table, appearing relaxed and unconcerned. Mackenzie knew this look meant nothing. Armalin was a poker player’s worst nightmare. He could move shockingly fast when he wanted, too—from zero-to-gone, as some put it. “Ask away,” said the general in a deep, pleasant voice.

“All right,” said the major. “What was the nature of your mission into this territory?”

“We have several missions,” said the general easily. “First, we wish to explore this region and find out what potential it has for settlement and colonization—once the zoms are dealt with, of course. This would not happen within the next year or two, and probably not even within the next decade, but Texas must think of its future.”

“Had you given any thought to the possibility that someone else might wish to claim this territory for expansion?”

“Until we met you and your troops, Major Jones, we did not believe anyone was alive farther west than the Rio Grande. Believe me, your appearance was quite a shock.”

“In addition to exploration,” said the general, “we are hunting for nuclear weapons and materials.”

This admission caused Mackenzie’s eyes to widen. Freeman coughed and cleared his throat. The major and the soldiers in the room stared at the general in astonishment at his bluntness.

“What did you intend to do with those weapons when you found them?” asked the major softly.

“Our original intent was to have the Landon Armaments personnel accompanying our force to study them and, if possible, take one or more back to Texas with us. We have a treaty with the Republic of Zimbabwe to share information on nuclear weapons manufacturing. Our government means to develop our own limited nuclear arsenal and use modified weapons sparingly against large concentrations of zoms—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said the major, “but when you say ‘zoms’ you mean ‘zombies,’ correct?”

The major shrugged. “Well, they’re not zombies like in Caribbean folklore, though some people still call them that. Most people I know call them ‘grubs,’ but I’ve also heard ‘honkers,’ ‘gringos,’ and ‘whities.’ I guess it depends on where you’re from. Please continue. You were talking about—”

“I was saying we intend to use modified versions of these weapons against large concentrations of zoms.”

“We are looking into developing radiation-enhanced weapons that could be exploded at high altitude, destroying all zoms below them but leaving infrastructure intact. Zoms are vulnerable to high levels of radiation, though they tolerate lower levels that would sicken normal people. We need weapons like this to clear large areas of land and eventually free those people who have been trapped for thirty years in citadel cities like Cleveland and Detroit.”

Mackenzie realized his mouth was open. He closed it and tried to appear nonchalant, but he knew the USCAF people could probably tell he had never heard this story before. Was the Old Man making this up? Hadn’t he once said that Texas had no use for nuclear weapons?

“That’s interesting,” said the major. He seemed to be as startled as Mackenzie at this revelation. “You said this was your original intention, but it is not so now?”

“Texas Vice President Michele Landon, Landon Armaments chief executive Andrew Landon, and their daughter Jodie, a field operations chief with Landon Armaments, are currently charged with capital murder, treason, conspiracy to overthrow the lawful Texas government, leading an armed insurrection, and about twenty other high crimes. Jodie Landon, who accompanied us at the start of our journey, is alone responsible for the deaths of over half the members of our expedition and the loss of most of our equipment. Our third goal is to find Michele, Andrew, and Jodie Landon and return them to Austin for trial.”

The news seemed to take the major’s breath away. He glanced at Mackenzie and Freeman before turning back to the general. “Do the Landons have anything to do with the three nuclear explosions we detected on Friday night?”

“Yes. Jodie Landon attacked our expedition with a low-yield nuclear-armed missile, then followed up with the destruction of Hoover Dam and the flooding of the Colorado River valley in an attempt to destroy us or at least prevent us from carrying out our missions. She had earlier organized a massacre of our soldiers in an effort to seize our equipment as part of her family’s larger conspiracy against the Texas government and people.”

The Old Man gave the major a painful smile. “That is what we would like to know, too. We assume that they do. She apparently has control over Nellis Air Force Base and all the stockpiled weaponry there in Area Two.”

The major gasped. Mackenzie knew immediately that the major was not only aware of the existence of that old base, but knew a great deal about what was kept there. “You can’t be serious,” said Major Jones.

“I am. It seems she has so many weapons she can afford to throw them about on a whim. She, her family, and all those associated with them are dangerous beyond all expectation.”

Mackenzie saw a flare of deep annoyance in the Old Man’s eyes. He did not like being addressed this way by a lower officer, who had not once addressed the general as ‘sir.’ “We are also looking for old missile parts and information for both military and civilian purposes, but the capture of the Landons, a survey of the land, and the search for atomic devices are our primary objectives, with finding the Landons being priority one.”

The Old Man snorted. “We were to look for survivors, but that had low precedence for obvious reasons. Except for you and your troops, we’ve found none. There was a report of an alleged radio transmission from this area, but we’ve not heard anything since we left Texas a week ago. I don’t expect we will, either, unless it’s coming from the Landons.”

The major looked thoughtful, then said, “Does the phrase ‘helter skelter’ mean anything to you?”

They’ve heard Daria’s transmissions, thought Mackenzie. He betrayed no sign that the news had any meaning for him.

General Armalin looked genuinely puzzled. “It means chaos and confusion, I believe. Why?”

The Old Man gave a twisted smile. “I can’t imagine we would find either survivors or nuclear devices there,” he said. “Perhaps we would at the old China Lake facility, but otherwise no. On top of that, if Death Valley lives up to its name no one will ever settle there. If the Landons tried to escape there then we’d have to follow them, of course. May I ask a question or two of you, major?”

Taken aback for a moment, Major Jones considered the request and spread his hands. “I don’t see why not. Ask away, as you say.”

“Why haven’t we heard anything about the United States Combined Armed Forces before now? I’m certain you’ve listened to our radio programs, maybe even caught our television signals, but we’ve never heard a thing from anyone else in North America except for the citadel cities east of the Mississippi, and of course the islands.”

The major stared at the Old Man and did not answer immediately. At last he drew a deep breath. “We’ve had good reason to avoid announcing our presence to the world. I don’t know what Texas’s experience has been, but we discovered long ago that not every survivor of the so-called White Madness had the best of intentions at heart. Our forces were several times tricked by criminals using radio transmissions to draw survivors toward them, to rob, enslave, and murder them. I am also afraid we are familiar with the Texas-based corporation Landon Armaments, which has been sending its own private expeditions into California for at least the past five years and has caused us considerable trouble.”

“Have you been in conflict with them?” asked the Old Man, leaning forward in his chair.

“We have,” said the major. He tapped his pencil on the paper pad. “What guarantees can you give me that you and your men are not in some way still allied with the Landons?”

Mackenzie instantly understood this was the crux of the problem. The USCAF soldiers did not trust the Texans and did not see why they should, given the possibility the latter were secretly working for the Landons. The major had consistently referred to the Texans’ missions in the past tense, as if they were now ended, while the general spoke of them in the present tense, as if they were ongoing. Any possibility that the major would let the three Texans continue with their operation unhindered, even with their forces so severely depleted, evaporated in the lieutenant’s mind.

“It would help if someone in your command could read minds,” said General Armalin blandly, “but barring that, I have no idea.”

“And neither do I,” said the major. “Pardon my asking, Armalin, but are you in any great hurry to leave and keep looking for nuclear weapons?”

The Old Man pinched the bridge of his nose, sighed, then continued. “Given that we have no working vehicles, few weapons, and about a tenth of our original force of thirty-plus left alive, I would say we were in no hurry to be anywhere at all. If possible, I would like to communicate with the government in Austin to inform them of the situation, and with your permission I would like to let them know that we are not alone out here. That news would cause considerable rejoicing, I would think.”

“I will consider it,” said the major. He pushed his chair back from the table, and Mackenzie knew the meeting was over. “At the moment, we have our own set of objectives and I should see to them. In the meantime, I’ll have our medical staff attend to your injuries.”

“That would be greatly appreciated,” said the general. “Please see to my lieutenant’s wounds first. Speaking of medical issues, I had a personal question for you.”

Suddenly tense, Major Jones stared at the general as if anticipating an insult. “Yes?”

If the major had been surprised before, he was momentarily speechless now. “Yes,” he finally said. “He did. Did you know him?”

General Armalin smiled, deeply pleased. “I did not, but it is an honor to meet you. I read your father’s book about his exploits as a neurosurgeon during the war. He was a great man.”

“Why, thank you, sir!” said the major after another speechless pause. He then beamed. “He loved talking about how he was accidentally drafted to work at a mobile surgical hospital before any of the paper-pushers realized he was black. His commanders kept telling the Pentagon that he wasn’t white and couldn’t work with white units at the front lines, but their complaints were always misrouted. They eventually sent him back to the States and discharged him from the Army, but he never got so much as a thank-you letter for all the work he did.”

“A great shame, but he was a terrific credit to the service—and to the San Francisco 49’ers as well.” General Armalin motioned at Mackenzie and Freeman. “May I have a talk with my men in private?”

“Most certainly, sir,” said the major, getting to his feet. His friendliness seemed less forced and more genuine. “As I said, you aren’t prisoners, and we have much to gain by working together on our common problem—which I believe at this point would be Landon Armaments and of course the, uh, zoms, as you call them. My men will be outside. Come out when you finish, and we’ll get you the medical attention you require.”

To Mackenzie’s surprise, Major Jones motioned for the six troops in the room to follow him—and they did, leaving the major’s pencil and paper behind. He couldn’t believe the USCAF men would leave the Texans together to plot as they wished… unless, of course, that was exactly what the USCAF men wanted. Mackenzie rubbed his eyes. The room had to be thoroughly bugged with listening devices and probably with cameras, too. USCAF was clearly no slouch where technology was concerned.

Mackenzie looked at Freemen, who stared at the tabletop with a weary look, then turned back to the Old Man, who had picked up the pencil and paper and closed his eyes. He’s using that object-reading power he used earlier on Jodie’s dosimeter, Mackenzie thought. He’s probably read our thoughts already and figured out what happened to us. He saw the general nod agreement with that, which made him shiver. He would never get used to working for a mind-reader. It then struck him that the Old Man had undoubtedly also read the minds of everyone else in the room. He probably knew more about the USCAF side than they did about the Texans.

Mackenzie no sooner had that thought when General Armalin put down the pencil and paper, then leaned back in his chair with a tired expression. He did not look at either Mackenzie or Freeman when he spoke. “Private Waller panicked when Jodie Landon set off the last two nukes,” he said. “I knew he was shaky after the first attack, but I thought he’d hold it together better than he did. He tried to take the truck and flee south when I wasn’t aboard. I barely got on the trailer as he was taking off. Master Sergeant Lucas and Private Lobo hung on near the gooseneck while I climbed over the belted-down supplies to reach them. Waller took a shot at me and missed. I got to the gooseneck and stayed low with the other two, out of his line of fire.

“Top couldn’t move and Lobo’s hands were burned, so I got the idea of going over the gooseneck and jumping for the cab’s rear window, maybe throwing something at Waller first to distract him or knock him out. Then Lobo got the same idea. He went past me up the gooseneck and jumped, grabbing the window ledge and then snaking an arm around Waller’s neck in a choke hold. I can’t imagine how he did it with his hands injured as badly as they were. I jumped for the window and managed to crawl into the cab before we crashed. Waller had turned off the Interstate at Yucca before he lost consciousness, either deliberately or by accident. I couldn’t get to the brake in time to prevent the truck from going off the ramp, through a guardrail, and into a tree. I remember hearing your tanker go by a few minutes later, but I wasn’t in any condition to flag you down.

“When I could get around, Waller was dead with a broken neck. Lobo was on the ground outside in bad shape. Lucas and some of the cargo had been thrown free of the wreck. When I found him—” The Old Man hesitated and swallowed “—there was nothing I could do. The radio was useless after the nukes went off. I sat with Lobo for several hours and tried to make him comfortable until he died. I could hear Lake Mead roaring by several hours later. I didn’t know at the time if you had made it across to California. On top of that I couldn’t sleep from thinking about those damned vampire bats—” The Old Man gave Mackenzie a significant look “—so I stayed with the truck and felt pretty low.

“I thought there might be a chance you two were still on the Arizona side of the river, so I started a bonfire and made a lot of smoke in case you turned back. It had the unexpected effect of drawing the attention of our new, um, allies, and to my great surprise they picked me up in a helicopter. They’ve developed a noise reduction system for the main rotors, a neat little trick. That’s how we got here. You didn’t hear them land behind the hangar. They’re very tight-lipped about where they’re from, how many of them there are, and so on, but I hardly blame them. They brought the bodies of our men with them for burial, which was damn descent of them. Everything on the truck was left at the crash site. Doesn’t seem like any point in going back for it now.”

“Those guys took those Landon Armaments papers I found, sir,” said Freeman, looking up. “They thought they were mine. I tried to explain it to them, but—”

“Don’t worry about it. They’ll figure it out. They’re on the paranoid side but things will get better.”

“What now? We need to get your arm looked at before we do anything else. I’m amazed you’re still on your feet after all you’ve been through. After that—” The general shrugged, then looked Mackenzie directly in the eyes. “You remember what I told you at White Sands, right?”

Mystified at first, Mackenzie then recalled the general’s words to him the night before the massacre: Find the girl and find out what she knows. Do everything in your power to stop the Zom. You are permitted everything in order to do this.

“Be true to Texas,” said Mackenzie, to cover up the question for anyone listening. The phrase was the motto of the Third Infantry.

“That’s it,” said the Old Man, who then turned to Freeman. “Sergeant, while the lieutenant gets medical attention I’d like to find out what happened to you two after Jodie Landon destroyed the dam. I have a feeling you have quite a story to tell.” He glanced at Mackenzie again. “Go get yourself fixed up,” he said. “We’ll talk later.”

“Yes, sir,” Mackenzie whispered. He got to his feet and walked out of the room, leaving the door open at the general’s request. He did not remember until much later that he had not touched his coffee and had left it behind. Waiting outside were six USCAF soldiers, weapons aimed at the floor. He nodded to them and asked, “Is there a medic or doctor who can see me?”

“That’s Captain Coffin,” said one, a sergeant. “The major said to take you to her.” He made a hand gesture, and two of the six men escorted Mackenzie away while the others remained outside the conference room door, relaxing as they listened to the general and Freeman talk about the latter’s adventures.

Mackenzie was led into a room that might once have been a kitchen. It had recently been reworked into serving as a very basic doctor’s office, with a countertop once used for food preparation now serving as an examination table. An attractive woman in an officer’s uniform looked up from a desk and studied Mackenzie with interest.

“First Lieutenant Michael James Mackenzie, Third Texas Infantry, sir—uh, ma’am. Sorry.”

The woman smiled to herself as she finished writing something in a log book, then put down her pencil and got up. “You’re the first Texan I’ve ever seen. Not used to seeing a woman in uniform, lieutenant?” She motioned for him to get on the exam table. Mackenzie glanced at the two guards, but they had already taken seats in two chairs near the door, their weapons resting between their knees with their butt ends down and muzzles pointing at the ceiling. He did as the captain indicated and sat on the edge of the counter while she began to examine his left arm.

The captain kept her afro short and wore no makeup. She seemed to be both young and old at the same time, her skin smooth and her face untouched by time but her personality settled and mature. It made her real age difficult to guess. What caught Mackenzie’s attention most solidly, however, was that she had the top two buttons on her dark green fatigue shirt undone. She seemed unaware that as she leaned toward him, taking his arm from its sling, she presented him with an unimpeded and breathtaking view down the front of her uniform.

Aware after a few seconds that he was staring, he made himself look at her name tag instead, which did indeed read: COFFIN. He made up his mind not to tease her about it. She had doubtless heard every possible joke about her name before now and had no desire to hear more. Then, too, pissing off the only doctor within hundreds of miles seemed an ill considered option. Mackenzie made himself look away from her cleavage, instead studying a nearby map on the wall.

“I need to take off the bandages,” the captain said. She looked up at him. “Let me know if it hurts.”

“It always hurts,” he replied steadily, still looking at the map. “Just do what you need to do, ma’am.”

“Hmmm,” she said, then looked down and went to work. Mackenzie grimaced as she peeled away layer after layer of cloth strips, increasingly stained yellow and red. “Whoever did this did a good job,” she said at one point.

“That would be Sergeant Freeman, ma’am. He seems to know something about everything.”

“No, ma’am. They seem to like politics better. That way they can give us orders.”

The captain laughed at that—then inhaled sharply when she removed the last bandages. She studied the wound with a worried look. Mackenzie glanced down and saw that the hole in his arm now contained tissues that had turned bright red and even black, with yellow-white pus leaking from it everywhere. Bone fragments were still visible. The surrounding skin was reddened and oddly streaked. “How and when did this happen?” she asked.

“This is badly infected.” She carefully turned his arm to study the injury from different angles. “I’d say you were probably shot less than a week ago, maybe three or four days. This doesn’t look good. You need to be in a hospital.”

Mackenzie was suddenly aware of a general malaise he had been feeling since he woke up earlier that day. It was almost like the onset of a bad case of flu—slight chill, headache, sweating. He was also aware that the mission with which he had been entrusted was in danger of never being completed. The Zom would go on forever because he got hurt in a gunfight. Millions more would die all because he failed to keep going and stop the Zom.

“The best I can do right now,” said the captain evenly, “would be to give you antibiotics, clean and sterilize the wound, and pray that you don’t drop dead from septic shock and organ failure until you get major medical attention.”

I’m not going to die yet. “That would be fine,” he said after a pause. “I still have a lot to do, ma’am.”

She looked into his face with amazement. “That would be fine?” she repeated. “What the hell are you talking about? I wouldn’t give you three more days to live unless you get help right now. What’s so important that you want to forget about it and go back to whatever it is you do? Is this some kind of male thing, putting on a bandage and ignoring your health until you fall over dead?”

Mackenzie swallowed. The urgency of his mission pressed hard on his mind. Even if she did a quick fix and let him go, how would he ever manage to get away from these people and get back on the road, with or without Freeman and the Old Man?

The captain placed a clean gauze square over the wound, then got a thermometer from her desk, shook it, and put it in his mouth. She took his pulse, then checked the thermometer reading. “You have a fever, too.” She checked his eyes, ears, and throat, then felt his neck under his jaw. “Your lymph glands are swollen. You might be in sepsis already. There wasn’t any way you could get back to a real hospital when you got shot?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, not meeting her gaze. He had to think of a way out of this. He knew he had little time left in which to act.

“All right,” she said. She stepped back and looked him over. “I’m going to talk to Major Jones. I’m not going to sugarcoat the news: you’re in bad shape. It’s up to the CO if we’ll evacuate you to Edwards or just keep you here. Either way, you need to lie down and rest. You’re not going anywhere.” She started toward the door. “Keep him in here,” she said to the two guards. “I’ll be right back.”

When the door closed behind her, Mackenzie did nothing for a minute but sit on the counter and absorb her evaluation. He was a little worried that perhaps she was right. Eighteen years old, and his life was almost over. How would anyone tell his father? How would his father cope with the news?

He raised his gaze and noticed a map on the wall. These United States people sure did like maps. Having nothing else to do, he slid off the table to his feet.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said one of the guards. “Sit your ass down.”

“I want to see the map,” Mackenzie said. He walked just over a yard’s distance to see the map clearly. He stopped there and looked it over.

“Don’t try anything,” warned the guard, “or else you won’t worry ‘bout your arm no more.”

Mackenzie ignored him. It took only seconds to find where Needles Airport was on the map, which covered southern California, southern Nevada, and western Arizona. Las Vegas appeared to be at the map’s center. There was (the former) Hoover Dam, (the former) Lake Mead, the Colorado River Valley to the south, and Death Valley to the west. He noticed Edwards Air Force Base to the far west and thought that was probably where these soldiers had come from, unless Edwards was someone’s name. That information wasn’t relevant at the moment, however. All he had to do was figure out a way to get away from the airport and get to Death Valley. He would never be able to overpower the USCAF soldiers alone, and he could not elude them unless there was a distraction—but it would have to be something really serious, something huge and immediate and dreadful that would make everyone forget about the wounded lieutenant for a minute or two, something like…

Do everything in your power to stop the Zom. You are permitted everything in order to do this.

His eyes widened. He studied the map a while longer, ran a few place names through his mind and rehearsed them, thought about what he needed to do. There was a good chance it either would not work or would work far too well. In any event he would have to leave the general and Freeman behind, but that could not be helped. The long-delayed mission to find Daria and stop the Zom was his, not theirs.

When he heard footsteps approaching the room from the hallway, he walked back to the countertop and got on it again. He made himself look and feel listless and ill. It was not hard to do.

The door opened and Captain Coffin walked in. “The major’s going to call Edwards and see if we can ship you back for a short stay, but only if you behave yourself. You try anything, and the deal’s off and you can die right here in bed if we don’t have you shot first. Do you understand me?”

“Eighteen. What did your mother say when you joined the army? Was she against it?”

Mackenzie turned to the guard. “My mother is dead,” he said. “And if yours isn’t, she soon will be.”

“You motherfucker!” The soldier came to his feet, his weapon coming up in his hands.

“At ease!” shouted the captain, placing herself between Mackenzie and the enraged guard. “Get out of here! Place yourself on report immediately!”

The soldier hovered on the brink of a double murder—then lowered his weapon two inches. “I’m gonna get you, man!” he said to Mackenzie. “I swear it!”

“I said, at ease!” the captain yelled. “Put down your weapon and stand at ease!”

Running footsteps sounded in the hallway. The door burst open and more soldiers came in.

“Take this man’s weapon and place him under arrest,” said the captain. “Confine him to whatever bare room is available and watch him. The major and I will handle him later.” She gave Mackenzie an angry, disgusted look. “And put this one in one of the bunk rooms after I get his arm fixed. Ignore him if he gives you any lip. He’s too sick to know what he’s doing.”

Mackenzie lowered his head as if beaten. Inside, however, he reveled in the realization that he now had a chance. Captain Coffin told him to lie down on the counter so she could work on his arm. He made himself relax as she prepared a painkiller. All he had to do was to wait for the right moment, then act.

Needles Airport, 5 miles SSW of Needles
Former state of California
Monday morning, predawn, September 6, 1999

The painkiller wore off a little over three hours after Captain Coffin administered it. Mackenzie got barely an hour of fitful sleep before he awoke to a dull throbbing in his left arm. His head ached and he was sweating profusely. After checking the time (and discovering his watch had been moved to his right wrist), he lay still and listened to the muffled voices in the next room. He could not make out what was being said, but both men and women were talking. Someone laughed. They were up pretty late, he thought. He tried to remember what happened after the captain finished cleaning the wound, but he drew a blank.

He turned his head to see his surroundings. Dim light from under the door illuminated the small room where he lay. It did not seem to be a bunk room. No pictures or maps were on the walls. Other than the cot he lay on, the room held only a row of file cabinets and a metal folding chair. It was similar to the room in which Freeman had placed him earlier, though much smaller.

The plan, he remembered his plan for escape. He had to get up and get things going, or else he’d never be able to leave. I’ll leave the room and see if I can sneak out, he thought. If someone catches me outside, I’ll pretend I’m delirious. That would work. In fact he felt rather delirious at that moment. Strange thoughts troubled him, and he could not recall if everything that had happened to him recently had been part of a bad dream or reality. It was best to think of it as real, he decided, as it gave him something to do to take his mind off his arm. Summoning his willpower, he made an effort to sit up. He succeeded but immediately began suffering from a pounding headache and a spell of nausea. The nausea at least went away. Maybe the captain had been right, and he was in worse shape than he realized. If he kept moving, though, he thought everything would come out right. He pulled on his boots and tied them up, then stood and straightened his uniform.

He needed a two-way radio for his plan to work, but the only radio he knew of was in the tractor-truck. It would do fine. He slowly made his way to the door, where he stopped to listen as someone walked by in the hallway outside. The walking stopped, a door opened and shut, then all was silent.

The door to Mackenzie’s room was not locked. The knob turned easily in his hand. With infinite care he cracked the door open and listened, looked around and saw no one, then slowly slipped out of his room. It was then that he remembered the guards outside. His plan to sneak away from the building was not going to work. He would no sooner open the door than USCAF guards would rush over and march him right back inside—unless they very much wanted him to be outside. A solution to his dilemma came to mind.

No longer worrying if he was heard, Mackenzie left the door to his room open, then doubled over and coughed a few times. Someone stirred in the room across the hall. Boots trod the floor, then a nearby door opened.

“Hey, what are you doing up?” A surprised USCAF soldier came out of the room, one hand on his sidearm.

“Please go back to your room, sir,” said the soldier, relaxing slightly. “Come on.”

“I don’t want to throw up in there. Can you take me outside? Fresh air would help.”

Another door in the corridor opened. Captain Coffin peeked out and squinted at the two men. “What’s going on?”

“The lieutenant was out of his room, ma’am,” said the soldier. “He thinks he’s going to throw up.”

“I need some air,” Mackenzie gasped. “I feel—” He cupped a hand over his mouth and appeared to swallow something back “—I’m going to throw up.”

“Take him outside, then,” said the captain. “He’s not going anywhere in his condition. Just stay with him in case he falls down or passes out. Better he throws up out there than in here. We’re evacuating him in the morning.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The soldier took his hand from his holstered pistol and gently caught Mackenzie by the left shoulder, careful not to touch the arm in the sling. “Let’s go outside, sir. This way.”

Mackenzie soon found himself in the cool night air, walking out of the building under the glare of several electric light. An odd-shaped car painted entirely a flat gray was parked next to the building with its supply-packed trunk open. It had to be that old hot rod that Freeman liked so much. Mackenzie walked past it on unsteady feet, then stopped and bent over, as if about to vomit. He then straightened and ran a hand over his face. “I feel awful,” he whispered. To his surprise, he really did feel awful.

The soldier looked around. “Don’t get any ideas about running away, sir,” he said.

Mackenzie shook his head. He had no intention of running off. In his condition he doubted he could run the distance back to the room where he had been sleeping. He cupped a hand over his mouth again. This time the nausea was for real. The feeling was bad, then it got worse, and then—

“Jesus,” said the guard as Mackenzie threw up. “I’m glad we got you outside before you did that.”

Mackenzie knew something was seriously wrong inside him. The captain had a word for his condition—sepsis, that was it. He used to know what that word meant. It came up at Buxton Ridge in medical classes. All he could remember now was that it meant the sufferer was in extremely bad shape. He wondered if he had radiation poisoning as well.

He spat, coughed, and spat again. “I gotta walk around,” he mumbled. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Mackenzie staggered along in the darkness, heading for the night-shrouded truck that had gotten him here. He paused to bend over once more, but he no longer felt like he had to throw up. It still didn’t feel so much like an act, though.

When he looked up, he pretended to notice the tractor-truck was there. The two cab doors were wide open. He guessed the USCAF troops had searched it and were perhaps airing it out. Mackenzie made his way to the rear of the truck and put his right hand against one of the rear tires so he could lean forward. He held that position for a minute, coughing and spitting. He heard the guard with him call to the other soldiers on guard duty and ask them what was up. Mackenzie then caught a deep whiff of the abominable chemical-and-dead-fish stench the truck had acquired from its time in the flood. His nausea returned with horrific force.

“Blood poisoning. He got shot and the wound got infected. Cap’n doesn’t think he’s gonna make it.”

“That Texas general said it was the Landons. They shot up their own convoy to steal the trucks and equipment.”

Mackenzie pushed himself away from the tires and walked toward the cab. He sat down on the metal step that the driver used to get into the vehicle, letting his forehead rest on his right hand. The odor from the truck was ghastly. To prevent himself from vomiting again, he pinched his nose shut and breathed through his mouth with his eyes closed. That seemed to help. The soldiers paid no attention to him. They stood in a circle almost a hundred feet away and talked about going on vacation to do something they called surfing. It had to do with boards and water. As one guard described the last time he rode a pipeline—whatever that meant—Mackenzie stood and leaned his head against his right forearm, which was pressed against the elevated driver’s seat. Seeing that no one was looking at him, he put a foot on the metal step, stood on it so he could reach into the cab, switched off the speaker switch on the radio, then switched the radio on. He grabbed the mike from its holder and got down from the step, standing once more outside the truck with his head resting on his arm. The handset mike was concealed in his right hand. He steadied himself, rehearsed what he wanted to say one more time, then pressed the transmit button and hoped the radio was still set to 500 kHz.

“Wolf One,” he whispered hoarsely, trying to disguise his voice. “Wolf One, this is Gamma Wolf, come in please. We’ve lost sight of your vehicle. Wolf Pack has regrouped eighteen miles west-southwest of Oatman, across the river from Mojave Valley. Repeat, Wolf Pack has regrouped eighteen miles west-southwest of Oatman, on the west side of the basin across from Mojave Valley. We made it across before all the bridges were washed out. If you made it across after us, rendezvous with us as soon as you can. We will wait here for one hour before we head north to find a way into Vegas. Meet up with us as soon as you can. This is Gamma Wolf, out.”

Mackenzie glanced back at the guards. One was talking about getting out of the military next year and starting a fruit orchard. He then turned his head and made one last transmission.

“Wolf One,” he said. “we see a vehicle coming toward us. Flash your headlights once so we can tell if—roger that, Wolf One. Out.”

He let go of the mike and left it on the driver’s seat with the radio still on. If some poor dumb bastard happened to be standing at the location he had just described in the Colorado River Valley, only a dozen miles north of the airport, that guy had only minutes, possibly seconds left before he and everything within sight of him was turned into molten slag—assuming Jodie Landon or her forces overheard the broadcast. Don’t fail me now, you crazy bitch, he thought. Turning away from the truck, he ambled back toward the building door.

Mackenzie stopped and coughed as he waited for his guard to catch up. “I’m ready to go in now,” he said. “I don’t think I can throw up anything else. At least I hope not.”

“What? Oh, at the truck? No, I was praying for a quick death. Thanks for letting me go outside.”

“Sure thing, sir,” said the soldier. “Seriously, I hope you get to feeling better.”

“Thanks,” said Mackenzie. “To tell the truth, I could use a little good luck right—”

Mackenzie and the guard both jumped as loudspeakers mounted around the roof of the building emitted a deafening horn blast, followed by a woman’s voice at high volume. “Code Blue Zero! We have a Code Blue Zero! This is not a drill! Three minutes to touchdown!”

“What the hell is that?” said Mackenzie, thinking he knew damn well what it was.

“Major-league brass is coming in!” said the guard, looking stunned. “Why are they coming here?”

“It could be the Old Man himself!” said the guard. “Jeezers, we’d better get inside and get ready!”

The soldier hustled Mackenzie into the building. The scene was already chaos. Soldiers were hastily pulling on pants and shirt, pushing past each other in the hallways, bellowing orders, and cursing nonstop. “It’s the Old Man!” Mackenzie heard Major Jones shout. “He’s coming here!”

“Put the lieutenant back in his fucking bed in the side room!” yelled Captain Coffin. “If he puked outside, somebody better get the fuck out there and clean it up right this fucking second! Clean this motherfucking place up! Get that fucking underwear off the floor and get your nasty ass dressed! Jesus H. Rap Brown Christ, what the fuck’s wrong with you motherfucking dumbshits?”

Mackenzie was quickly but carefully manhandled back to the room where he had been sleeping. The guard left him there and ran off. Moments later, Sergeant Freeman made his way through the mob to the doorway of Mackenzie’s room. Freeman as usual had only his pants on, and he carried a nervous, whining Spike in his arms.

“What the hell is going on?” Freeman grumbled, glaring at Mackenzie as if the madness around them were his fault.

“I don’t know!” said Mackenzie. “Someone said the Old Man is coming, but they had to be talking about someone on their side, not General Armalin! Maybe one of their generals is coming.”

“Speaking of which,” said Freeman, peering into the jammed, noisy hallway, “where’d our Old Man go off to? You seen him?”

“Before you go looking for him,” said Mackenzie, trying to get Freeman’s attention, “I have to tell you something important!”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Freeman, handing the dog to Mackenzie. “Be right back. I gotta make sure my stash is safe.”

“No! Freeman!” Mackenzie put Spike down and shouted into the packed hallway. “Freeman! Freeman!” He felt his head begin to spin. He gripped the door frame to keep from falling, then went back into the small room and sat down hard in the folding chair. He was exhausted, and the pain in his left arm was driving him mad. Had he caused this near-riot with the radio messages he sent? It didn’t seem possible. He didn’t know if he should hope that Jodie had heard his message or hope she hadn’t.

A deep, rapid thumping sound could be heard through the ceiling as the USCAF soldiers ran through the halls. The thumping noise grew louder in short order. Mackenzie heard Spike whine from his hiding place under the cot. He looked but could not see the pooch.

“This should be interesting,” said General Armalin as he stood in the doorway and watched the last of the soldiers leave the building. “It seems that the general in command of their entire armed forces is coming on a surprise inspection. Or maybe he’s coming here because of us. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

“That general isn’t the only surprise coming, sir,” said Mackenzie in a low voice.

The Old Man hesitated and looked down at the floor as if concentrating on a problem—then he stared at Mackenzie with a mixture of amazement and horror.

“It should be here any time now,” said Mackenzie. “They won’t bother to look for me after that.”

“I believed you were the one person alive who stood the best chance of completing your mission,” said the Old Man with a trace of awe, “but I appear to have underestimated your determination.” He looked down the hall at the exit door. “We’d better go outside ourselves,” he said. “If it’s a near miss, this building will come apart like tissue paper in a hurricane. I’ll get the sergeant. You’d better go out and get ready to move.”

The Old Man left at a quick trot in the direction Freeman had taken. Mackenzie could not get to Spike, so he left the door to his room open and went outside as the general had suggested. The USCAF troops stood in a platoon-sized formation in the outdoor lights, facing the airport’s landing strips. The major and captain stood at the front of the formation at attention.

The thumping sound became extremely loud. Settling toward a spot off to one side of the formation was a large, dark green helicopter with a curious circular emblem on one side: a black buffalo against a gold background, surrounded by a halo of gold stars. It reminded Mackenzie of the backs of old U.S. nickels he collected as a child. Written in block letters along the side of the helicopter were the gold-lettered words: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. On the helicopter’s tail was painted: CINCUSCAF-2. A cloud of dust flew out in all directions as it closed in on the ground.

That helicopter had not yet touched down when the side doors opened and heavily armed and armored soldiers jumped to the pavement and took up positions in a very large circle. A second helicopter then came down from the night sky and landed in the center of the armed circle. Mackenzie was not surprised to see CINCUSCAF-1 painted on that one. The second great ‘copter touched down and cut its engines. Two armed soldiers ran in under the whirling rotors and stood at attention by a side door as it opened.

The uniformed man who stepped out of the helicopter was the most powerfully built human Mackenzie had ever seen. Perhaps six and a half feet tall, he had the musculature of an Olympic weightlifter but moved with easy poise and grace. Crouching under the rotors, the general (he could be nothing else) strode away from the helicopter, then straightened as he approached Major Jones. The latter gave the general a snappy salute, which the general returned in less than a half second.

“Major Jones,” said the general, whose bass voice could be heard even above the noise from the two helicopters. “Where are those three Texas Army soldiers?”

“They are not prisoners, major!” the general snarled in a voice so loud that half the soldiers in formation flinched. “I am relieving you of your command at once. Report to my adjutant in my helicopter for immediate reassignment.”

Mackenzie thought he saw the major turn white. “But sir, in the interview we sent you, they—”

“Immediately!” As the major hurried away, the general turned to Captain Coffin, who saluted him with a trembling hand. “Captain, take me to the three Texas Army soldiers.”

“Yes, sir!” The captain turned on her heel and headed for the building. She was startled to see Mackenzie standing outside the building, then was even more shocked to see General Armalin and Sergeant Freeman (still wearing only trousers) walk out of the building. The captain started to point out the Texans, but the general brushed by her and walked up to General Armalin, coming to a stop before him. At the exact same moment, the two generals saluted each other.

“General Armalin,” said the weightlifter general, “on behalf of the Combined Armed Forces of the United States, please accept my apologies for any ill-treatment you and your men suffered while in our company.”

“I thank you, sir,” said Armalin, extending a hand. “It is a pleasure to meet—”

As the other general clasped Armalin’s hand with his, Armalin gasped and stared at his opposite number in disbelief. “My God, it can’t be!” he said. “Good God in heaven! General Bradley, sir!”

Mackenzie and Freeman looked at General Armalin, then looked at each other in complete bewilderment. They then looked back at the two generals.

Mackenzie was on the verge of saying he had no idea when General Bradley put a hand to one ear as if listening to something only he could hear. A second later he roared, “Get down! Get down!” and swept Captain Coffin and General Armalin off their feet.

Uh-oh was the last thing Mackenzie thought before the night turned brighter than the blinding white sun.

Only the walking dead can be blindly accepting of what's happening in the world today.

California SR 127 (Death Valley Road) at Shoshone, to Furnace Creek, Death Valley
Former state of California
Monday evening, September 6, to Friday morning, September 10, 1999

The following day afforded Mackenzie a great deal of time to think. There was little else for him to do, other than walk down an endless length of desolate highway under a blinding ball of flame. He did not think a great deal about his surroundings: a parched desert wasteland where scraggly bushes grew among rocks and along dry gullies. It was more than enough to observe the passing environment without concentrating on it.

Most of the time he thought about what a pain it was to have to walk because his only other mode of transportation had broken down, and he wondered if his left arm would get better or worse after Captain Coffin worked on it. He also thought at times about Daria—who was she? Could she have gone crazy from living alone? At any rate, if a girl could trek through mountains and desert for days on end, he could do it, too. She, however, had not earlier that day been thrown violently around the interior of a two-door 1955 Chevrolet One-Fifty that ran off the road after a tire blew out, then hit a large rock and promptly blew out the other front tire and smashed in the radiator. His chest and left arm ached from hitting the steering wheel. The rest of his body was bruised and broken window glass had cut him in a few places, but he was functional enough. It was pure luck that the old gray car hadn’t rolled over.

He walked away from the wreck an hour later with a duffel bag full of supplies salvaged from the mess strewn about the area when the car’s doors and trunk flew open on impact. He took a little of everything—everything, that is, but water. Freeman had filled three large metal containers with water and placed them in the car’s trunk, but each container was too heavy to lift and carry by itself. Mackenzie drank as much as he could, then abandoned the rest for another traveler to find. He took the guns, filled his pockets with food, medicine, and ammunition, hefted the bag on his back with his right arm, and headed north.

As he walked he thought also of the circumstances under which he had left Freeman, General Armalin, and the USCAF troops the night before. It was impossible not to feel quite guilty about it. The disruption at the airport immediately after the bomb went off had been complete. No one paid any attention whatsoever to him. He only had to get in the Chevy, start it up with the keys someone had thankfully left in the ignition, and leave. He doubted anyone would attempt to follow him for a long while. Why would they? They had just survived an atomic attack and did not blame him for it. (Well, General Armalin might, but he hadn’t tried to stop the event.) Jodie’s missile launch appeared to have been almost dead on target against the place that Mackenzie had described over the radio, hoping she would hear and unknowing provide the chaos that would allow his escape.

However, he knew it was entirely possible that as the dust settled in the aftermath of the attack, someone would recall hearing a radio transmission from a man who claimed to be with General Armalin’s force, though the man also said he was miles north of the airport. Finding the switched-on radio and loose handset mike in the tractor-truck would point the finger of suspicion right at Mackenzie. The Old Man wouldn’t be able to cover for him there. The Old Man might not even want to cover it up. It would be unwise for Mackenzie to ever think about going home again after this.

Such was the price for sticking to a desperate mission. He accepted the consequences with the reckless optimism of youth and moved on.

As sundown neared Mackenzie could not even guess how far he had walked that day. The wreck had occurred at midmorning along an unidentifiable stretch of highway. Before then, using a map Freeman had left in the car, he had taken a roundabout way of reaching Death Valley, in case he was sought by vehicles or aircraft. Driving far to the west along Interstate 40, he had crossed over to Interstate 15 at a burnt-out city called Barstow. The bridge over the Mojave River had collapsed, but it turned out to be possible to drive down the slope to cross the dry riverbed, go up the other side, then drive back up to the freeway. He then headed east on 15 until the sun rose. At the ruins of an old tourist town called Baker, he turned left onto Death Valley Road. The accident followed soon thereafter, but it did not matter, or so he told himself as he walked. He was almost at the finish line.

The crimson sun disappeared below the distant mountains about the time Mackenzie saw a cluster of ruined buildings ahead. The sight was heartening, as vampire bats were increasingly haunting his thoughts. A fallen sign informed him that he was entering the town of Shoshone: “The Gateway to Death Valley.” He supposed in his case that was a good thing.

Some buildings in Shoshone had burned down in the past and left only stone foundations behind, but others were reasonably intact. A car-repairs garage attracted his attention and he trudged toward it, hoping to find a room he could seal off to allow him to sleep without fear of never wakening. The bay doors were closed and the main door was locked, but he broke out a windowpane and unlocked it. He went inside with his .357 loaded and ready. After an hour of careful exploration during which nothing challenged him for ownership of the building, he placed his duffel bag in a room he thought might once have been the manager’s office. It had no windows, the ceiling and floor were solid, and the door had a deadbolt lock. It would more than do.

He ate a can of cooked apples before lying down in the dust on the floor with a pile of old newspapers for a pillow. Fear of becoming a meal for tiny vampires and the dull ache in his left arm were not sufficient to prevent sleep in his exhausted state. He did not know how long he slept before he awoke, unaware of what had disturbed him.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. He lay half awake, listening to it, when he heard it again. His eyes opened wider. It was not thunder, he realized. He was listening to explosions. They were quite far away, but there was no mistaking it. Was Jodie up to her old tricks? Two more blasts were heard, one right after the other, then a third. It sounded like a war was going on. Perhaps there was. Had USCAF brought in the heavy artillery against the Landons? He listened a while longer, losing count of the explosions, then drifted off to sleep again. A last and very loud roll of thunder managed to stir him, but only briefly.

When he finally awoke, his muscles were sore and stiff. It took him a while to get up from the floor and find the doorknob to get out. Daylight came in, making him rub his eyes. His .357 in hand, he went outside the building to relieve himself and look around. Shoshone looked less like a town than it did a patch of light forest with old debris littering the ground under the trees. He stretched, got his bearings, then went back to retrieve his belongings and get on the road again. He reached down for his duffel bag, and that was when he saw a red tomato and a metallic canteen where none had been before. They sat on the pile of newspapers that doubled as a pillow.

Mackenzie jumped back and looked wildly around. “Hello?” he called. He pulled out the .357, then thought better of it and lowered the weapon, finally tucking it away. “Hello?” he called again. No one answered.

He checked his things, then picked up the tomato and examined it. It was ripe and perfect, with a green stem attached. Someone had taken time to nurture the tomato and care for it, then had given it to him as a gift instead of eating it for himself—or herself. When he unscrewed the canteen’s cap, he found it was full of cold water.

Once more, someone was looking out for him with gifts. The tomato had been garden grown, so whoever it was lived in or around the garage.

“My name is Lieutenant Michael Mackenzie, Third Texas Infantry,” he said aloud. No response. He tasted the tomato and thought he had never had anything better. It disappeared in four bites. He wiped off his chin, then shouldered his bag and called, “I have to go. Thank you, and I mean it. That really helped. Good luck to you.”

On his way out of the garage, Mackenzie passed a picture on a wall. The large black-and-white photograph showed a group of seven smiling men lined up in front of the garage in its better days, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Six of the men were white. One, a small thin fellow with a thick mustache and a short afro, was black. The handwritten name below the black man was Arnie. None of the other men had last names, either.

It was Arnie’s garage, then. Mackenzie wondered what it had been like for Arnie to have had six good friends and business partners one day, then lose them all to the Zom less than a week later. He might have had to do the unthinkable to save himself, perhaps killing every neighbor and acquaintance in addition, doomed thereafter to see no other friendly human face, black or white. He had probably lived alone in this ghost town for thirty years, hosting no other soul except for one today. After the Zom, he might not have wanted any further company.

Mackenzie looked at the photo, then lowered his backpack, rummaged around inside it, and took out a tin of molasses cookies. He placed that on the floor below the photo with a spare can opener, a .45 pistol that Freeman had found at the Needles Airport, and two boxes of ammunition for the gun. He felt better for being able to give something back for once.

“Goodbye, Arnie,” Mackenzie called. He slowly walked out the bay door and down the road, looking back to see if he could catch a glimpse of his benefactor. He never did.

He was passing a small grocery on his way out of the ghost town when he realized he was doing a stupid thing: traveling in daylight. If he lay down for sleep when it got dark, the bats would have him as a midnight snack. He looked around at the remains of the old town, then walked to the grocery, pushed open the glass door, and went inside. After tearing down spider webs and exploring the aisles (picked clean long ago), he dropped his bag next to the cashier’s desk, propped himself up in a sitting position with his back to his duffel bag, and made himself fall asleep. He awoke periodically to see if evening had arrived. When the sun was very low in the sky, he ate a short meal and set out again, his duffel bag sitting in a rusting shopping cart he pushed ahead of him. It was easier than carrying the bag on his back, and he was pleased with the idea.

He walked the entire night without stopping. In a barren wasteland of brown rocks and eroded hills he made camp at dawn, sitting in the shade of the shopping cart and bag to sleep. He awoke at one point to see a rattlesnake making its way toward the shade and, incidentally, his legs. When he scooted away from it, it recoiled and moved off. After that he sat in the shopping cart to sleep, draping his shirt over his head and face.

For two monotonous nights he pushed the cart along the desert highway. Occasionally he spotted flying creatures crossing the face of the moon. He saw wild horses in the distance, and coyotes eyed him with curiosity, but no living thing approached him. No zoms appeared. He wondered if they had all been summoned away by whatever unearthly power controlled them.

Near dawn on Thursday, out of water and in despair of finding a route west toward Daria’s refuge before he ran out of food, he found signs indicating a town was ahead. He pushed on and at mid-morning reached Death Valley Junction. The most significant structure there was a white-painted Spanish-style strip mall with a large building at one end. The main building bore a sign identifying itself as the Armargosa Opera House. He broke through the doors of the opera house and collapsed on the dusty floor in exhaustion. When he was able to move, he searched the building and discovered it had a well from which water had long ago been pumped. He removed the stone covering over the yard-wide well and saw water about fifteen feet below. A search of the opera house turned up some old wire and a pail. The water, though it was cloudy and smelled of minerals and rust, was pure nectar.

After spending the day at rest in a hotel-style room he found in the complex, he ate the last of his food, then filled all the sealable containers he could find, loaded them in the cart, and set out that evening for an intersection a short distance away. There he turned left onto State Route 190 and began walking west. He could tell he was going up a slight incline toward the mountains. The map showed that he would in time reach a narrow pass, then descend into Death Valley itself on the other side. It was likely he would be there by morning. He was glad he was so close to the end of his travels. He could feel a new fever and chills starting up, and he wanted to complete his work before he died.

The going grew more difficult as he continued to walk uphill. In time he did not think he could stand it any longer and yearned for death. An eternity after that, he reached the pass and stopped, standing and leaning on the grocery cart. He was afraid that if he sat down, he would fall asleep and that would be the end of him. He drank a little water before continuing onward. The road perceptibly began to drop. He was in Death Valley.

It came to him as he walked that he had never had the slightest idea of what he would do when he met Daria. Was there even a Daria there? Had the major been correct in suspecting that the signal had been part of an elaborate trap? Would he run into zoms, monsters, or criminals? Or would he sink down and die on the highway just short of his goal? What if he did make it, though? What could she possibly tell him that would make the slightest difference to the world? How had he imagined that he of all people could stop the Zom?

He eventually passed a large marker officially informing him that he was entering Death Valley National Park, courtesy of the United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. He passed side road with signs telling him only Authorized Personnel could travel them. He felt a stirring of hope and less like a mindless zom stalking a nonexistent goal on a meaningless mission.

And then in the cool night air he smelled smoke. Specifically, he smelled a burning petroleum-based product that reminded him of aircraft fuel. He stopped, looked all around him, then moved on with a wary eye. Perhaps he was hallucinating. He thought it would not surprise him if that was the case.

The landscape was brightening under a predawn sky when he saw the crash. A large cargo or passenger plane had attempted to land on a rocky field, with predictable results. The tail of the plane was intact, sitting upright on the desert floor where the skid marks from the fuselage hitting the ground began. Beyond it the fuselage had broken into several pieces, scattering debris everywhere. One wing was mangled and burned, and most of the other one missing, engine included. The nose and cockpit were not visible. He saw that the road would pass several hundred feet from the crash site and pressed on toward it, forgetting briefly about his various pains and discomforts. He was a half-mile away when he realized the aircraft was a prehistoric twin-engine DC-3 from the Texas Air Force.

That brought him to a complete stop. The Old Man had said something about Michele Landon and a few flunkies escaping from Austin aboard a cargo plane. The DC-3 would fit that description, but the Old Man thought Michele had gone to Holloman, then to that old Air Force Base by Vegas. Was this the same aircraft? Who had been aboard the plane when it went down?

He began walking again, more quickly. An hour later, having left the cart on the deserted highway, he reached the smoldering wreckage on foot. The sun was almost up, so he could see clearly. He walked by blackened pieces from one of the engines, a ragged piece of clothing, metal tubing, a decaying human hand. Human body parts were everywhere. One bloated, decapitated body wore a blood-soaked, dried-out uniform with a Landon Armaments patch on it. Mackenzie stared at the body, then began a careful search through the twisted remains of flesh and metal. Part of the fuselage and most of the tail were riddled with bullet holes. Mackenzie remembered the explosions several nights earlier. Had the USCAF or Texas attacked Nellis in retaliation for the nuclear strike, driving the Landons or their followers to flee toward Death Valley? Was this the end of the Landons’ power?

It was only a short time before he found the intact bodies. They were in a group of seven, five men and two woman, sitting around the remains of a campfire. Empty cans and paper cups lay around them. Their skins had turned an ugly shade of brownish green and begun to bloat, in addition to being nibbled on by scavengers. They wore Landon Armaments uniforms. All of the bodies bore injuries they had probably sustained in the crash, though they had clearly survived. Their lives, however, had ended from being shot to death, probably by a submachine gun or automatic pistol given the number of bullet wounds they had. Several bodies had bullet holes in their hands and arms, as if they had tried to shield themselves from the shooter. None of the dead looked familiar.

He tried to guess how long the bodies had been here. The bodies were rigid, their limbs stiff, and they gave off a sweet-sick odor of decay. Maybe two or three days had passed since they were killed. He then noticed that there were no supplies by the bodies, no food or water or medical items. Everything could possibly be of use was gone.

One last look around the crash confirmed that none of the dead appeared to be a Landon. A minute of thought passed before Mackenzie headed back for his shopping cart at a quick jog. If any of the Landons had survived, there was but one place for them to go: Furnace Creek, the refuge that Daria called Obladi Oblada. The same place Long Lonny, whoever he was, had appeared to Daria over a week earlier.

He got to the cart, got all of his weapons out, and made sure the firearms were loaded and within easy reach. He tried to arrange items in the duffel bag so that it would create semi-bulletproof cover if he was fired upon. It was better than nothing. When he was finished he began pushing the cart along while eyeing the surrounding desert for signs of life or movement. He passed signs pointing toward tourist attractions: Naval Spring, Corkscrew Canyon, Twenty Mule Team Canyon. The amount of windblown sand and dust increased until he was forced to abandon the cart and carry everything that would not slow him down in a firefight. He took only one container of water. If he survived whatever was to come, he could come back later for the rest of his supplies.

About midmorning, at a spectacular roadside overlook that the signs called Zabriskie Point, he found the corpse of a woman wearing a rumpled executive skirt-suit and expensive shoes. Her right leg was heavily bandaged, and she appeared to have been getting along using two metal pipes as crutches until someone shot her through the left eye. Mackenzie recognized her from her campaign posters. It was Michele Landon. Again, there were no supplies with the body, no weapons, food, water, or tools. Had someone traveling with her grown tired of being slowed down, tired of listening to Michele’s complaints, tired of Michele’s consumption of valuable resources?

Mackenzie left the body and moved on quickly. The half-buried road made twists and turns through a shallow valley bordered by timeworn cliffs and hills, the roadsides dotted with sand dunes, ancient telephone poles, and enormous boulders. A dry creek bed paralleled the road on the left. To his surprise he even passed through a small forest that grew right along the road, the tree roots breaking through the asphalt in many places. An underground spring was likely in the area.

A few hundred feet beyond the forest oasis was another human body. This one was a young man in a Landon company uniform. He had been wearing a backpack and marching along when someone shot him in the back of the head. It was impossible to recognize his face, as he had none after the tumbling bullet exited his skull. The blood-splattered backpack had been opened. Mackenzie checked to see if anything was left. To his surprise, the backpack held one item. It was a single carbon copy, the last page of the transcript of Daria’s Morse code messages. The text was a duplicate of the same document the Old Man had given Mackenzie over a week ago. Whoever had taken the rest of the document had accidentally left the page behind.

By this time Mackenzie knew that he was following Jodie Landon. He could not think of anyone else who would shoot fellow survivors of a plane crash to keep the food and water for herself. If Jodie had already found Daria, then Mackenzie’s cause was lost. The Zom could not be undone.

On the positive side, he could still kill Jodie Landon. He didn’t care about his bet with Freeman at this point. Jodie needed dying before she destroyed anyone or anything more. She needed dying more than anyone ever did.

It was almost noon when he caught sight of four rusted-out vehicles far ahead, parking to the side of the road in a large lot. Behind the parking lot was a breathtaking paradise of tall palms and conifers, thick undergrowth and brilliant flowers of every color imaginable. Obladi Oblada. He was finally there.

He paused to again prepare his weaponry for best effect. The Thompson submachine gun was gripped in his right hand, braced against his shoulder to fire. His .357 Magnum was tucked away, and a fully assembled and loaded LAC-10 hung from a shoulder strap next to his machete sheath. With the greatest care he walked toward the oasis, looking about him for snipers, zoms, or anything else that might conceivably come at him. All was quiet as he approached, skirting the edge of the greenery to give the place a complete going-over before moving in. He peered around a thick growth of fir trees and came to an instant halt.

The scene before him took several seconds to comprehend. On what looked like an open patio just over a hundred feet away was a group of six kneeling women, sitting upright on their feet. They were naked, thin to the point of being skeletal, and were dirty, scratched, and bruised over every inch of their skin. Their hair was clotted with filth and dust. It astonished Mackenzie to see that they were as pale skinned as zoms, but they did not act like zoms, sitting so passively yet attentively before another being, as servants before their master. Was one of them Daria?

The being in command wore black and was seated straight-backed on a block of stone. Lying across the being’s lap was an object that resembled a long, badly corroded spearhead from a bygone day. Flakes of rust from the spearhead stained the being’s hands.

“Hello, Lieutenant Mackenzie,” said Jodie Landon. “I bet you’ve been dying to see me.”

Furnace Creek, Death Valley
Former state of California
Friday, high noon, September 10, 1999

Mackenzie stared at Jodie Landon for a long moment, assuring himself that it was really her and not someone else. She had no firearms, so he felt he could afford a few extra seconds to be certain. The submachine gun then came up with the muzzle centered on her face.

“Give it a try,” said Jodie. Her smile broadened. “See if you can kill a god.”

His finger curled around the trigger, ready to blow her backward off her stone perch—yet something was disturbingly off. He hesitated. Jodie Landon looked older than when he last saw her, possibly a little taller and thinner. Her face had a regal touch to it. There was a significant change in her bearing, her posture, and her confidence. His instincts warned that Jodie, in some unknowable way, had the upper hand.

“I’m serious, Lieutenant,” she said with an encouraging smile. “Try it. Shoot me. I want to see what happens, too.”

Mackenzie felt his chest tighten. Something was dreadfully wrong. She was insanely confident. He began to fear he had fallen into a trap and was on the verge of making a fatal error. She’s tricking you! cried his rational mind. No, she isn’t, said his gut. His finger relaxed but stayed against the trigger. Killing her would take only half a second, when he chose to do it. For now, he chose to wait.

“As you wish,” she said with a sigh. “There’s always later. I hope you will forgive me for a brief monologue. I have a few things I want to tell you. Yes, I’m sorry, it’s so cliché to descend into oratory like this in the moment of my triumph, but you need to know this and you need to hear it from me, and it can’t wait. Sure you’re not going to shoot me? Wanna give it one last chance?”

She paused, then smiled. “Here goes, then. I discovered yesterday that I had wasted my life, the whole fucking thing. That’s the truth. I wasted my life believing that the best way to gain absolute power was through constant utilization of the mundane, all the basic tricks my dear, departed, unloved mother taught me: guns, lawyers, sex, money, murder, treachery, et cetera. And I believed her. Machiavelli did not have a better teacher—nor a better student. Can you possibly imagine my surprise, then, at discovering that there was a better way to power? A shorter way? An easier way? You could have pushed me over with your little finger. The fastest, surest, easiest way to power, Lieutenant Mackenzie, lay in the grass at my feet when I arrived here yesterday morning. It was this.”

Jodie carefully lifted the ancient spearhead so that it bridged the palms of her hands. To Mackenzie it resembled a long, broad-bladed dagger with a long hilt, the hilt being the long socket for a long-gone wooden pole. The dark corroded metal stained Jodie’s skin wherever it touched her.

“This primitive Roman lance head is the key to power I had never imagined existed.” Jodie looked up, eyes wide and bright. “The way to the top turns out to be through the power of belief, through sheer force of will such that the world responds to my every whim without delay or effort. With this decaying relic, all I have to do is wish for a thing to happen, and it will happen. It’s magic, Lieutenant Mackenzie. I have discovered magic in the last days of this shattered hand-me-down world, in this valley of the shadow of death. I have the power to do anything I want and get anything I want, anything at all, because of this weapon. Do you know the name of this weapon, Lieutenant Mackenzie?”

Uneasy, Mackenzie glanced behind him in case she was distracting him prior to making a sneak attack. No one was creeping up, no assassin with rifle or crossbow was visible. He turned his full attention to Jodie but still felt he had missed something.

A corner of Jodie Landon’s mouth pulled back. “You certainly are not a talkative man today, are you?” she said. “Cat got your tongue? I hate keeping up both sides of a conversation by myself. It isn’t gentlemanly of you to refuse to participate. This is twice you’ve done this to me, too. Not nice of you at all. Very well, on with the monologue. Do you know what this device is, Lieutenant Mackenzie? You actually do, though you think you don’t. It’s mentioned in the Gospels, Lieutenant, in the Book of John, Chapter Nineteen, during the Crucifixion. I am positive you read that at least once. As Jesus hangs on the Cross, the Romans come to break his legs so that he might die quickly and be taken down before the weekend. The soldiers see that Jesus is already dead, but one of them has a long spear with which he pierces the side of Christ, just to be sure, and blood and water run out of Jesus' body.”

She raised the horizontal lance to just below the level of her eyes. “This is the head of the weapon with which Jesus was stabbed, Lieutenant, the very same iron lance with which the body of Our Lord was mutilated to make certain he was dead. This weapon has a legendary reputation that grows more dire by the year. It has appeared and vanished over the centuries and changed hands uncounted times, all the while shaping the course of human history whenever it fell into the hands of one who was capable of understanding it, one who was worthy of its secrets. It operates through the power of belief, a power that humanity unknowingly confers upon it by believing the artifact is a dark and conflicted symbol of rulership. After all, it is a weapon that stabbed one who was already dead, one who is regarded then and now as the prince of peace, a Power both living and dead. I cannot explain why such a belief should work for this one thing and no other that I know of, to give it such potency, but as surely as I hold this treasure before me I know it is true. The lance speaks to me, Lieutenant, in a voice without words, yet I understand everything it says. It must sound crazy for me to say that, but it is a fact.

“This relic tells me that whoever possesses it is given the chance to partake of its supernatural energies, its ability to alter and recreate destiny. It generates a new reality by simple application of the user’s will. Whoever owns it is destined to rule a great part of the earth, perhaps the entire world, for as long as the spearhead is in that person’s possession. It belonged at one time or the other to many powerful figures in history, most of whose names I am certain you know. The last person to whom it belonged was a mad, delusional ex-convict, a nothing of a man with a strange personal magnetism. Though virtually unknown to the world around him, he nearly brought the human species to extinction. What Daria said about him was correct: it was he, the head of her so-called family, who created and maintained the Zom, and he did so with this device, simply by wishing it so.”

Mackenzie thought about that. He shook his head. “Are you finished?” he asked.

“No, but if you still intend to shoot me, I can offer you proof that all I have told you is true. I am your new god, Lieutenant Mackenzie. Whatever I proclaim to be shall be. None can stand against me.”

“You’re a lot crazier than I thought,” he said, but he feared she was even crazier than that.

Jodie smiled a wicked smile. “Skeptical, I see. Then watch this, Lieutenant. See and believe.” She turned to one of the battered, naked women kneeling before her. “You, with the brown hair: stand up and gouge out the right eye of the redhead sitting next to you. You, redhead, do nothing to stop it. Do it now.”

A woman with short brunette hair rocked on her heels and got to her feet. Mackenzie almost shot her by reflex, but she showed no zom-like interest in attacking him. She stepped behind the red-haired woman on her right and reached down. Her left hand grasped the redhead’s face, steadying it, then she dug her fingers into the orbit of redhead’s right eye. The redhead jerked and cried out, then began to scream in unending agony. The muscles on the brunette’s arms stood out as her right arm worked, her fingers pushing, twisting—then she pulled her bloodied hand from the redhead’s face and flung something red and wet to the paving stones in front of her still-screaming victim. The brunette stood straight and looked to Jodie for further instructions.

Mackenzie felt a ghastly urge to vomit. Any possible eroticism in seeing so much naked feminine flesh before him was completely undone. He had a horrible urge to drop his weapon and run for his life.

At a motion from Jodie, the brunette went back to her place and knelt down again. “Quiet!” Jodie snapped at the redhead, who stopped screaming though ragged sobs broke from her. Bright crimson droplets fell from the redhead’s chin to her bare legs, then ran from there in streams to the stones below.

Jodie turned to Mackenzie. Her face glowed with excitement. “You would not believe the things they will do to each other if I command it,” she said. “I’ve never had so much fun in all my life. I must have run through a hundred living people since yesterday, just waiting for you to get here. And they weren’t zombies at all—they were white but otherwise like you and me! My God, it’s unbelievable what they will do!”

“Oh, the people? Daria’s family. It’s hilarious. They all came here looking for this—” She indicated the spearhead in her lap “—but they never found it. I have to tell you the story, it will only take a moment. I’ll keep it short. See, the crazy white ex-con who owned this spearhead did not like black people. Imagine that. For some silly reason he did not like them at all. And he had this interesting idea that if he could get a few white people to attack the black ones, the blacks would fight back, there would be this enormous war, and the blacks would win by killing all the white people. It was his idea of Judgment Day.

“Now, here’s the funny part: if the blacks won, the ex-con thought that he would then be in charge of the world. You probably think I have issues, but that is crazy. He thought black people would be his willing slaves. Seriously, he did! I mean, he was insane, after all, so it made perfect sense to him. He would have died a complete nothing, unknown to the world… but then some idiot gave him this marvelous antique, and there it went, the whole of civilization down the drain. This ex-con wasn’t entirely stupid, but I must say he wasn’t far from it. He used this spear to take control of all the white and light-skinned people on earth, and he made them kill dark-skinned people. Why didn’t he take control of the blacks and just have them walk into the ocean? Who knows. Anyway, there you are. He caused the Zom—with this.”

Mackenzie forgot to breathe as he stared at the dark spearhead. This wasn’t possible. It was crazier than crazy. She had to be lying to him. He was terrified of the possibility that she wasn’t. He licked his lips and started to say something.

“Wait a minute, I’m almost done,” said Jodie, raising an index finger. “Give me one more minute. The ex-con wanted only his little white tribe of groupies to be immune to the spear’s effects. His ‘family’ would not be zommed, you could say. That included Daria. Everything went smashingly until earlier this year, when he lost the spear.” Jodie shook her head as if sad and disappointed. “Losing the spear is bad, you see. You can’t really get it back once it’s left your possession and someone else is using it. The short of it is, that scrawny white girl you’ve been hunting for, Daria, stole the spearhead from the ex-con when she ran away. I don’t believe she knew she had taken it, though. The spear is a tricky little thing, kind of intelligent in a crafty, self-serving way. It can fool you, tempt you, even seduce you into doing harmless little things for it, like carrying it off without anyone knowing right away it is gone. Daria brought it with her when she fled her so-called family. She probably held it right in her hand and never knew it. Amazing, but true.”

Mackenzie kept the submachine gun trained on Jodie, though he did not know if he could summon the will to fire it. He still sensed a trap. “Long Lonny,” he said, remembering Daria’s message.

“Yes, Long Lonny, that’s what they called the spearhead. It’s also known to Biblical historians, such as one of my much-despised school teachers, as the Holy Lance or Spear of Longinus. Longinus was supposedly the man who thrust the spear into Jesus’ side. I don’t personally believe that there is anyone named Longinus, ghost or otherwise, living inside the spearhead, but you never know. You can probably guess the rest of the story. One day about a week and a half ago, Daria finally discovered the spear and panicked. She knew her depraved clan of incestuous human shit would eventually be on the lookout for the spear. And that brings me to my original point, Lieutenant Mackenzie. Every single person in Daria’s ‘family,’ including the ex-con, came here looking for the spear, led by a dog that Daria had failed to kill. Strangely, not a one of those people saw the spear when they arrived. I don’t believe it wanted to be seen. I’m not sure how it did that, but no matter.

“When I got here—and how I got here is another story, perhaps for later—when I got here, I found the spear right off. I learned its secrets in half an hour, then tried it out. My experiments—more like play, really—indicate that now that I possess the spear, Daria’s family is no longer immune to its effects. With the proper encouragement they were quite forthcoming with all sorts of information, and when I got tired of listening they provided me with unbelievable entertainment. Do you know, Lieutenant, that after all the other white people were dead, the ex-con wanted his family to come out of its hiding place on the other side of Death Valley and sweep over the world like the locusts in the Book of Revelation? I liked that idea and I’ve had some time to tinker with it. You cannot possibly imagine what Daria’s degenerate, unloved family has gone through in the last twenty-four hours. You simply can’t. That little trick with the eyeball, that was nothing.”

Mackenzie could hardly speak. “What happened to Daria?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “Where is she?”

“Ooooh, right. Daria.” Jodie appeared to think. “You know how when you have a box of candies, and there’s one sweet in there that you love so much, you have to save it for last?”

“Well,” she said, “sorry to tell you, but I didn’t. On that note—” She turned to the women kneeling before her and pointed at Mackenzie “—my locusts from Hell, it’s Judgment Day! Kill him!”

Each one of the six women before her stood up at the same moment and turned to face Mackenzie. They were shape-changing even as they came about: arms and legs lengthening, bodies thinning and hardening, eyes bulging from their sockets, mouths filling with needle teeth. Mackenzie’s finger jerked on the trigger before they took a step. The nearest woman caught a dozen hits to the torso and head before she completed her metamorphosis. Blood sprayed those around her as she fell backward. He swung the Tommy gun toward Jodie. He half expected she would turn out to be bulletproof or would disappear, but that didn’t matter so much as making one deadly sincere effort to kill her. He pulled the trigger as she stared right at him with a lurid smirk.

The submachine gun misfired and exploded in Mackenzie’s face. He found himself screaming and staggering backward, his injured right arm waving in the air. Streams of blood ran down into his eyes from scalp wounds and blinded him. He wiped his face on his right sleeve, heedless of the stabs of pain that brought, and tried to see what was before him. The five surviving women were no longer human. In their place were five white-bodied monsters, grotesque praying mantises that reared their small, deformed heads twice as high as Mackenzie was tall. With shrill cries from fanged mouths, they advanced on him with their spiked forelegs pulled back to strike.

Mackenzie reached behind him and came out with the .357 as a one-eyed mantis lunged at him, its lower jaw unhinging to bite into his face from scalp to jaw. He shot it through its good eye and blew out half its brain, then snapped his aim to the left and shot the next mantis in the chest. The blind mantis ran into him and knocked him to the ground as it charged by, flailing its forelegs about. Two other mantises charged and tried to pin him to the ground with the longest spikes on their chitinous forelimbs. He rolled to the left and came up and shot the closest mantis twice as it changed direction to attack. It squealed as it stabbed down. One spike tore a new hole through Mackenzie’s injured left arm. He yelled as he shot the mantis in the mouth, incidentally decapitating it. Blood jetted from the monster’s neck as it sagged. It was immediately shoved aside by the other shrieking attacker, all too eager to dive in next. Mackenzie heard something near his head. He thrust the .357 backward and fired blind. The mantis that was trying to get to him by his feet collided with the mantis attacking near his head, but one of them stabbed him in the right thigh. Mad with pain, he scrambled back and got to his feet, cursing and limping. After grabbing for another firearm but finding none, he reached up and drew the machete over his shoulder.

The mantis he had shot by his head was fighting with the one it had struck. It shoved the other one away and started to turn about when Mackenzie charged it and chopped down through its abdomen with both hands, cutting it in half. The mantis screamed and its limbs jerked as it collapsed. The mantis it had struggled with sprang at Mackenzie and struck as he swung the machete in an overhand blow. Great claws stabbed into Mackenzie’s shoulder and raked down his back. The machete split the mantis’s head in two and cut off a forelimb at the shoulder.

Dazed with pain, Mackenzie dropped the machete and grabbed his left shoulder. The collarbone was broken. He rose above his agony and looked around, fearing more mantises were close by. On the ground were four bodies, three of them mantises and one a vile combination of human and insectoid parts. He looked wildly around but did not see the blind mantis or the sixth mantis. The LAC-10 on the ground a few yards away. One of the strap attachments had broken off. As he staggered toward it, he heard a hissing sound and looked to his left.

The flying mantis kicked him in the ribs as it shot by and sent him tumbling into one of the dead mantises. He writhed on the ground with his lungs filled with knives. Seeing that the flying mantis was circling back, he rolled and tried to get to his feet. When he realized he wouldn’t make it up in time, he fell back and the mantis rocketed by, missing with another brutal kick. He saw the machete and crawled toward it on hands and knees. His fingers closed on the grip as the mantis came back on a third attack, but it saw the machete and changed course to go around him. It was the same mantis that had been shot in the chest. The mantis circled him in the air at high speed, but he turned in place and kept it in sight, maintaining the standoff.

Abruptly it dived to the ground not far from him—and changed shape once more. It was a woman again, the same brunette who had torn the eye out of the redhead. When the change was complete, she stooped—and picked up the LAC-10 with skilled hands.

Mackenzie had nothing left but the machete. He threw it at her one-handed. It whirled end over end and hit her along its blunt side as she brought up the LAC-10 to open fire. She went down backwards. The automatic carbine clattered on the pavement. As she started to get up, Mackenzie was on her. He struck her in the face with his fist, then snatched the LAC-10 and hit her with it over and over and over until he lost count of the times. He never once thought to fire it.

When at last he could not raise the carbine for another blow, he dropped it and fell back exhausted. She was dead or unconscious, he couldn’t tell which through all the blood on her ruined face. He didn’t care about her any longer. He picked up the LAC-10 and stood upright, gasping from bolts of excruciating pain shooting through his chest and limbs. After he wiped blood from his eyes, he surveyed the battle’s aftermath. Jodie was gone, which he had expected. The blinded mantis lay crumpled on the ground by a rusted truck. It had died and bled out into a wide red pool that gleamed in the sun.

He looked down at the LAC-10. Its bullets were as useless against Jodie as blades of grass. He knew the Thompson’s misfire was not an accident. She had used the spear to make herself unkillable. She might have altered probability itself to cause any attack directed at her to fail. Her underlings could be hacked and shot, but not her. Jodie had implied that the six women who served her were the last of The Family. He decided he believed her. She had no reason to lie if she really thought she was a god, and she had every reason now to think that.

Jodie was right, he thought: he would never be able to imagine the horrors to which she had undoubtedly subjected Daria’s Family. He wasn’t sure, however, if he pitied them. They had been on Charlie’s side in this war, after all. He wondered what had happened to Charlie, their leader. His fate was bound to have been unpleasant in the most extreme sense. He had created the Zom. Not even Jodie, the Queen of the Dead, would forgive him that.

At the heart of it all, he wondered most about what had happened to Daria. He had to know. He had gone through far too much to get here to leave her fate undiscovered. In the end he knew he had failed her. He had failed the Old Man, failed the last struggling remnants of the human race, failed even God, but he still had to find her.

Two concerns were foremost in his mind as he walked into the oasis and prepared himself for what was to come. His second biggest worry was that he wasn’t sure why Jodie hadn’t used the spear to control him, and more importantly why she hadn’t tried to control all the other surviving humans on earth. That would have been the easiest way to absolute power, yes? She seemed fixated on controlling The Family instead and making herself invulnerable to attack. It would be nice to know what she had in mind for the future. It would be even nicer to know how that damned spear actually worked.

His biggest worry, though, was what he was going to do when he found Jodie. He had to bring her down before she really did become the earth’s new god. She was ninety-nine percent there already. What she had in store for humanity when she revealed herself to creation would be the most unimaginable thing of all.

Furnace Creek, Death Valley
Former state of California
Friday, early afternoon, September 10, 1999

Through the palms and pines at the oasis, Mackenzie saw a gray wall that stood his own height, made of mortared stones. Above it rose pale, sun-bleached walls with dark, regularly spaced windows. As he approached he saw that the old inn was about three stories high, a long and architecturally interesting structure with short square towers at odd intervals. Bird nests had been built in windowsills, on walls, and in every tree. Vines crawled up the cracked inn walls; bushes and weeds had taken root even on the railed balconies and faded red roofs. Except for the drone of insects and the rustle of leaves in a dry wind, it was very quiet.

He had not gone far into the trees when he smelled the nauseating sweet scent of rotting flesh mixed with stale urine and human excrement. A clearing he saw ahead of him proved to be a large cement swimming pool surrounded by yard-tall shrubs and grasses. As he came closer to the pool, the stench of death and filth grew stronger. Watching his footing, he tried to see over the greenery to peer into the pool. He immediately regretted that action. The pool was so choked with mutilated human bodies, he could not see the water in which they floated. The bodies had been white-skinned, but now they were greenish black, swollen, and thick with flies. Many were missing limbs or had been disemboweled. None of them had an intact face. He swallowed, then retreated and continued looking for a way into the building.

Another patio, half overgrown, had a space where a door had been. The patio stank of old blood that coated every part of it and splattered the walls around. Mackenzie held his breath as he stepped onto the patio and carefully peered into the building. He recoiled at once and covered his mouth and nose. A body hung from a rope by its neck just beyond the door, turning slowly in a breeze. Everything below the corpse’s upper chest had been cut away except for the red-stained bones. Like the bodies in the pool, this one was missing its eyes, nose, ears, and the skin from its face. The scalped head hung to one side, its black tongue sticking out between its teeth. Flies were everywhere. It was impossible to tell if the body had been male or female.

Unable to tolerate the smell, Mackenzie moved on. Judging from the condition of the bodies he had seen, everything meshed with Jodie’s story of having killed everyone present the day before. The heat merely sped up the process of decay. He prayed Daria’s body would not be so grossly abused—assuming none of the dead he had seen so far were in reality the lonely teenager who had tried to escape a living hell, only to have it come looking for her instead.

Within a half hour he had walked clockwise around most of the oasis. Three other massacre sites came and went, each with a dozen or so unidentifiable corpses in revolting poses. He was amazed that he had not thrown up. Some of the dead appeared to have been cut to pieces, others impaled with old tools, and still others set aflame with gasoline or oil (apparently while still living) and burned until they were carbonized.

Another doorway finally appeared, without nearby bodies to discourage entry. Mackenzie tried the door, then went inside. He was in a stairwell with a single door ahead, under the steps going up. The door was locked, so he took the stairs. Where was Jodie? What would she do when she saw him? What would he do? He had no idea. At the next floor up, he found a door he could open. The mildewed corridor beyond stretched to the left and right. It was pitch black except for a hint of light to the left. Moving slowly, Mackenzie went left and kept one hand against the wall as he walked toward the dim glow. It seemed to take forever to get anywhere.

“I hear you,” Jodie said from somewhere ahead of him, as the glow grew brighter. “Take your time, we’ll wait.”

He almost stopped. It took a supreme effort of will to keep going. He had to find Daria no matter what Jodie did.

The corridor turned right, then opened into large room with a dark tiled floor and high windows that let in the sunlight. He was in a hotel lobby, the front desk to his right and the entry doors from the outside driveway to his left. Long cobwebs hung form the ceiling. The floor was littered with debris and thickly coated with dust.

“I hope you don’t mind if I came inside,” said Jodie. “It’s so hot out there today, and you looked like you were having so much fun with your new white girlfriends.” She sat on a straight-backed chair in the middle of the lobby, wearing her long black gown. The chair rested on what appeared to be a badly stained bolt of pale cloth. The Spear of Destiny was cradled in her arms like a newborn.

Mackenzie looked her over. She had no weapons. She didn’t need them. “Where’s Daria?” he asked.

“She’s probably hanging around somewhere,” said Jodie. “Sorry about the mess outside, but I haven’t had time to clean up after yesterday’s party. Daria’s family thought it was a scream.”

Jodie tilted her head and appeared to be in deep thought for a few moments. “I like to talk,” she finally said. “I need to talk. You’re the first real audience I’ve had since we left Vegas. And I’d like to make this one last a while. You’re kind of special to me. You deserve the best I can give, and I will, I promise you.”

He tried not to think about what that meant. “What happened back there? At the air force base?”

Jodie rolled her eyes. “Oh, someone else’s air force jumped us at night, shot a lot of my people to pieces and blew up my atomic stockpile—literally blew it up, set off one of the bombs and boom!—away it went. No more air force base, no more atomic stockpile. I was quite morose about it, but we were in the air by that time and leaving for good. Never look back, they say. Too bad my daddy couldn’t make it. I kind of lost track of him in all the excitement. Maybe he’s still back there, burned to ash or maybe just badly burned, with Lord knows how many zombies running after his ass. Who knows. Not my problem.”

Cold-hearted bitch. Mackenzie licked his dry lips. “They must be the ones we drove off in Kingman.”

“No, actually, they’re not. The guy who last owned this—” She indicated the spear “—figured that Daria was probably going to summon help. He was clever enough to see through her subterfuge, and he deduced that she would be getting help from the east, the direction opposite that she pretended to go. So, what he did—without the help of the spear, which was long gone by that time—was to summon all the zombies he could and gather them in two places, one group in Kingman and one in Las Vegas, to block anyone trying to approach Death Valley from the east. This took a few months because he was working with literally millions of zombies, the spear informs me, but he got it to work. You ran right into the smaller group. The big group was hiding in Vegas, right next to Nellis Air Force Base, and we missed it right up until those planes attacked us. The noise drew the zombies in our direction, and that was it. I imagine that any employees of mine who survived the premature atomizing of the base are just bits and pieces after something like ten million zoms, give or take a few, tore them into shreds—assuming any of the zombies survived, too.”

Mackenzie blinked. Ten million…? Then he frowned. “How could that guy do all that if he didn’t have the spear?”

“He still had the powers it gave him, at least until I officially got the spear and turned his powers off. And no, in case you’re wondering, I haven’t ended the Zom. I haven’t figured out what I want to do with a few billion faithful servants, even if they are of a hideous color and won’t go with any of the furniture I like, but I’m sure it will be fun.”

He mulled this over. He was getting a clearer idea of how the spear might work, but not clear enough to be of use. “So, the Family eventually went after Daria, you said—”

“Yes, yes,” Jodie cut him off. “They found her hiding here a few days after she stopped telegraphing her diary to the world. That part’s over with.”

“Her family? Oh my, yes, they whipped her until she couldn’t stand up. I showed up just in time to keep her from bleeding to death.” Jodie leaned toward him, her voice a stage whisper. “Just between you and me, she probably wishes she had died before I showed up.”

Jodie had spoken of Daria in the present tense. Was she still alive, then? “What are your plans now?” he asked, knowing his death would feature big in the near future.

“Hmmm, plans,” she said, looking him over. “I’m going to keep you alive a little longer. We’re not yet done with our tour.” She looked down at the ugly cloth at her feet, then lifted a long, narrow section of it with the toe of a shoe and flipped it toward Mackenzie. The narrow section was the skin of a human arm.

“This, by the way,” said Jodie, still looking down, “is a souvenir I took from the man who started the Zom. He’s looking a little low. I’m thinking of having him made into a lampshade eventually. It might be the first time in his life he was really useful.”

“Heavens, no. I had those women skin him, while he was still alive. They did an adequate job.” She tossed a glance over her shoulder. “The rest of him is alive out there somewhere, running around Death Valley skinless, every nerve in his red, bleeding body telegraphing raw, undiluted torture to his brain. He’s blind and deaf and crazed with the pain, screaming and running, running and screaming, and all that. It will go on like that to the end of time, I have so declared. He gave us the Zom, and I gave him the best I could in return. No need to thank me.”

“I wasn’t going to object on his account.” He swallowed and found it very hard to ask his next question. “What happened to Daria?”

Jodie sighed and shook her head at him in disappointment. “You really do want to slam it to that little white zombie twat, don’t you?”

“I just want to see her,” he said. “I came all this way to find her. I just want to see her, that’s all.”

“Hmmm, right. I suppose if you insist, I can arrange the meeting.” Jodie stood and lifted her chin as she looked at Mack. “It’s not like I hadn’t expected this, anyway. She’s not the sexy little angel you probably imagine she is, by the way. You don’t really know her at all. I doubt you care, of course. A penis doesn’t have a brain.” She turned and walked toward a door marked STAIRS UP. She gestured with one hand, the other cradling the spear. The door opened. She motioned for him to follow her, then proceeded on.

He followed her up the zigzag concrete staircase to the top floor. He dared not entertain hope of attacking her from behind. The exploding submachine gun was a clear enough hint of what would result. She gestured again and opened the last door, letting sunlight and a breeze pour in. As she walked out, he followed and saw they were on the top of one of those square towers, a flat square patio before him. He could see treetops beyond the low wall around the patio, with mountains beyond. Jodie went to the center of the patio and turned to face Mackenzie. “Do you like the view?” she asked.

Mackenzie shrugged as he looked around. “It’s—” he said, then he saw what she had meant for him to see. All the words he meant to say vanished just like that, as did his thoughts, and all the world but what he saw.

A small young woman, naked so that the evidence of her brutal handling could not be missed, hung motionless in the air with her thin arms outstretched as if nailed to a cross. The palms of her hands had holes torn through them where they had been pierced with unseen spikes. Her blood-streaked feet were only inches above the patio floor. A pool of drying blood had formed beneath her. For a moment Mackenzie thought the young woman was dead, then her bowed head stirred against her chest. Her breathing was shallow and weak. Her whip-tattered skin was once a light tan with reddened shoulders, neck, and forehead. Her long brunette hair was a rat’s nest with clots of blood and filth tangled in it. Her face was a monstrous bleeding bruise.

“There she is,” said Jodie. “Want me to give you some alone time with your new girlfriend? She’s still a virgin, I think. Hard to tell, really.”

“Let her go,” Mackenzie whispered in horror. “She didn’t do anything to you.”

Jodie sighed. “Other than make her watch her family play a few grown-up games, I haven’t done all that much to her—well, except for nailing her up in the middle of the air. She can’t breathe very well. It won’t take long for—”

“You don’t get it, do you? I was afraid you wouldn’t. You really are a Boy Scout.”

He kept his voice steady. “Let her go. Take me in her place, do whatever you want with me.”

“You really aren’t the man you could have been.” Jodie clenched the spearhead in her right hand, then turned to the hanging girl. “Fine, if you’re not going to stick something in her body, I will.” She approached the girl, her grip tightening on the blackened weapon. “I believe Longinus stabbed Jesus in the lower right side, probably right about—”

It came to Mackenzie then, what he had to do and how it would work and why it was all he had left to do to save his mission. Jodie heard him run up on her from behind. In a split second she turned and thrust straight out with the lance as if it were a sword. It ran through Mackenzie’s fatigue shirt deep into his abdomen. He doubled over screaming and stumbled past her, mindless from the shock. It took a long moment to realize through his agony that Jodie had let go of the spearhead. It was now his. He was dying from it, but it was still his.

He was moving more slowly with each thought. The second of time in which he was run through stretched longer and longer.

Jodie howled and lunged for the spearhead. Her fingers had not reached it when Mackenzie grasped the decaying weapon by its hilt and, without visible effort, pulled it from his abdomen as easily as he would slide it from a leather sheath. He then straightened up and stretched with his head back, his arms spread like wings. When he relaxed, no sign or trace of injury could be seen on him.

Expressionless, he turned to Jodie as she tried to snatch the lance from his hand. The rage in her face turned to paralyzing terror when she saw his eyes. The scream forming in her throat died as her body flashed with light. For an instant she became incandescent, blinding as the sun. The light faded, and a few ashes scattering in the wind and two scorched footprints on the tile floor were all that remained of her.

Mackenzie turned to the dying girl suspended in the air. Her arms dropped to her sides, then by degrees she came down until she lay on the patio on her side, as if in sleep. The holes in her palms had closed. The bruises and slashes and filth that covered her body were gone. A breeze rustled her thick auburn hair. Her chest softly rose and fell. She was the strangest girl Mackenzie had ever seen: creamy skin, lightly freckled face and shoulders, so small and thin and pale. He had crossed half a continent to find her, and here she was. He found it difficult to believe his quest was over.

Blinking as if coming out of a long slumber, he raised the weapon and inspected it closely. Flakes of corrosion peeled from its rough, dark surface and stuck to his hands. With a deep breath, he lifted the lance over his head and stretched his arms to the sky. He closed his eyes, holding his breath. The silence held for the space of ten slow heartbeats. At the end he exhaled and lowered the lance, swaying on his feet. Exhaustion that had not been present before filled his eyes, a complete fatigue of heart and soul. It was finished. The Zom was over—but there had been a price for ending it so quickly. He had to give up the spear, all of its powers, its sheer invincibility. It would go free again. Where it would go, he would never find out. He feared that the knowledge he had released it would haunt him forever. There was no choice, though.

With a dull countenance he looked again at the artifact in his hand, contemplated what he might do with it if he dared, if he decided to not be the Boy Scout Jodie had said he was—then he swallowed, knelt down, and carefully laid the antique device on the patio floor. He wiped his hand on his pants as he stood. His lips moved: No more. He would keep his part of the bargain, and the Zom would not return.

Deliberately turning his back to the lance, he concentrated on removing the sling and unwinding the bandages from his left arm. His forearm was smooth and whole where a festering wound had been. The soiled bandages dropped from his hands. He resisted an urge to look behind him and focused instead on the sleeping, unclothed girl. With deep sigh he knelt again, scooped her into his arms, and carried her inside, out of the heat of the burning sun.

A wind stirred the palms across the oasis and lifted thin clouds of ash from the ground, carrying away the debris as it reentered the wasteland. Sunlight sparkled on the surface of the clear waters of the pool. Dragonflies whirred over the green undergrowth. The air held only the scent of tropical flowers in bloom. No sign could be seen that any human being had visited the island of life since it was abandoned, or had desecrated its wild, exotic beauty.

Late that afternoon she stirred under the sheet on her bed. Her eyes half opened, the lids heavy with sleep, and she lifted her head to see where she was. Somehow she had gotten back into the bedroom she had made her own before… before that awful dream. It must have been a dream, it was too terrible to have been anything else—

She turned her head and saw him sitting in a chair by the bed. He had an open book in his hands, but he was looking at her, not the book. He wore a dark short-sleeved shirt he had found in a closet, with a pair of tan slacks and shoes without socks. She blinked several times to make the unfocused image clearer, but her glasses were gone. It finally came to her that what she was looking at was really there. Her eyes grew so wide Mackenzie could see white all around her irises.

She flinched at the sound of his voice, and began to tremble. He closed the book and waited. She licked her lips and tried to speak. “How did—how did you get—”

“I walked,” he said. “We heard you on the radio, back in Texas. A lot of us went out to find you. I’m the only one left.” He put the book aside on her bed. “Your name is Daria?”

After a prolonged effort, Daria managed to speak again. “I’m not a—I’m not a piggie,” she whispered. “I can think.”

“Not a piggie?” he repeated, not understanding—then it came to him. “You’re not a zom, is that what you’re saying?”

He thought she must have heard the term from listening to Texas radio. “Why do you call them piggies?” he asked.

“Oh,” he said. It was a song from the Beatles’ White Album, he recalled. He vaguely remembered the lyrics, which had been written in the margin of the transcript of Daria’s transmissions. “Did someone you know used to sing that song?”

“We used to sing it when—” Daria appeared to remember something and immediately looked around the room. Panic filled her face.

“Charlie’s gone,” said Mackenzie, guessing at the cause of her distress. “He won’t be back.”

“No! It’s—” She started to get out of bed, then realized she naked except for the sheet. She gasped and clutched the sheet up to her chin, staring at him with renewed terror.

“Would you like for me to leave?” he asked. “I can give you some privacy if you want.” When she didn’t answer, he got to his feet and started toward the door. He stopped once and looked back. “If you get hungry,” he said, “there is some fruit in the kitchen next door.” He pulled the door behind him on the way out, leaving it slightly ajar, then went across the hall to the old bedroom that Daria had months ago converted into a dining room and kitchen.

He was in the midst of pouring a cup of water for himself when he heard the shattering of glass. The sound came from across the hall. When he burst into Daria’s room, he found her out of bed, picking up a long, thin sliver of glass from the floor beneath a broken windowpane. She whirled when she heard him enter, one hand dropping to cover herself, but with the other hand she raised the daggerlike sliver so its quivering point was next to her heart.

“Don’t do that,” he said in a low voice. “You are safe here. You have nothing any longer to worry about.” He stayed where he was, just past the doorway.

She was hyperventilating as she watched him, trying to summon the strength to finish this last terrible act.

“You have no reason to be afraid,” Mackenzie said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I came here to find you so we could stop what Charlie did, you and I, working together.” He took a slow step toward her. “What Charlie did is over with. The Zom is over with. The piggies are gone. They are ashes and dust. It’s over.”

“No. Charlie is gone. He’s in a place that is worse than death. He will never hurt you again.” He took a deep breath. “Your family is dead, too. I’m sorry. Everyone you knew is gone.”

Daria anxiously shook her head. “I had a dream that they got killed,” she said, “but it was just a dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream, Daria. Someone came here and killed them. She was going to kill you, too, but she’s dead now. It’s all over. Please put that down before you cut yourself.”

Her voice grew stronger and more resolute. “You came here to kill me,” she said.

“No. I came to find out what you knew of the Zom and if you knew a way to stop it.”

She hesitated as she understood at last what Mackenzie had done. At the same moment Mackenzie realized she would kill herself if she figured out that he had control over the spear. He shouted her name to catch her off guard, then rushed in and grabbed her hand before she could react. The glass dagger was shaken from her grip as he then grabbed her in a bear hug and hauled her away from the shards of glass on the floor below the window.

She fought him with surprising ferocity. “No!” she screamed. “Let me do it myself! Don’t make me kill myself like everyone else did, please! Let me do it! Please let me do it myself! I want to die, I’ll do it, I promise! Please let me do it, please!”

He pinned her arms and held her until she stopped struggling and was only crying into his shirt. “It’s not going to happen,” he whispered. “It’s going to be okay. It’s over.”

“I did it!” she wept. “I’m the one who killed him! They were going to hurt him because he taught me how to read! He was the only person who was ever nice to me, and I killed him! I’m so sorry!”

He listened to her confession and almost said, I know all about it, but if he said that she would go mad for sure. He could only know the truth about Mister Crowe by getting it from the spear. In the brief moment of time in which they had communicated, it had told him everything about Daria’s long friendship with the black man named Daniel Crowe, once a garbage collector for Death Valley National Park until the Zom and his capture and enslavement by the Family. The spear had told him how Daria had slipped poison to Crowe before Charlie and the Family could torture him to death, the spring night she ran away from The Family’s compound. Knowing full well what she had done, Daniel Crowe took the poison and died peacefully, cheating the Family of its favorite spectacle sport. Daria had done the best she could do for him.

Mackenzie said nothing. He held Daria until she was quiet, then put her down and had her wrap herself in the sheet until she could find clothes among her things. He refused to leave the room as she dressed, not trusting her for a second alone. He had not come all this way just to see her die.

To his surprise, he did not find Daria sexually interesting even seeing her in the nude. The six women that Jodie had changed into murderous monstrosities were still fresh in his memory, not to mention the remembrances of all the zoms he had slain over the years, some of whom were not unlike Daria. Part of him saw her as a potential monster, more a thing and a threat than a person. It would take time to get over it. It was time he needed, and probably time she needed, too. Maybe someday, but not now.

On impulse, Mackenzie began talking as she dressed. He told her where he was from, about his father and mother, the move to Houston, all that had happened to him in the last few weeks since he had graduated from military school. When she was ready, they went outside and sat by the pool—a good distance apart, at Daria’s behest—as Mackenzie continued his tale. She listened and eventually began to ask questions. He told her everything.

Everything except about where he had put the spear. For some reason, she did not ask about it, and he did not bother to bring it up. It seemed there were more important things to talk about.

When Mackenzie finished, Daria talked. She remembered growing up in a psychotic commune where love and death were very much the same. There was no morality, no meaning to anything they did. Parents had sex with their children, children tortured and killed pets, pets were fed before the women ate, women questioned nothing men told them to do, men had all the power there was, and all the power there was flowed to and from Charlie, who was their god and tribal father. She recounted the story of her escape the night before Daniel Crowe was to be killed, wept as she talked about his death, wept as she described the deaths of the dogs who loved her.

“You said there was one dog you hated,” said Mackenzie. “One you weren’t sorry to kill.”

“That was Mad Dog,” she replied. “Helen Mom said he was probably my father. He treated me worse than anyone. He wouldn’t leave me alone that night, so I tricked him. I told him I would be his, but he had to go outside with me, far away from everyone else.” She paused, staring into space. “I took a knife from the kitchen, the biggest knife I could find.” She swallowed and looked at her lap. “I left after I hid his body. There was a lot of blood. I washed it off once I thought I was far enough away.”

Helen Mom. Mackenzie thought there was something in Daria’s face that reminded him of the brunette insect-woman he had fought last of all, the one he had left for dead. That might have been her mother, Helen Mom. He decided to never mention that to Daria. It was best forgotten.

The sun was low in the west. After a very long pause, still looking at her lap, she said, “He didn’t take me, Mad Dog didn’t. No one has ever had me.”

“I hate to ask this,” he said at last, “because I don’t want to sound like I’m afraid of anything, but are there bats around here at night?”

“Bats.” He gestured vaguely. “Blood-drinking bats. We ran into some on the way here.”

“Oh, those. Sometimes, but they don’t come here to Obladi. I think there’s something they don’t like about it, but I don’t know what. They never come here. Charlie made women stay up at night to keep them away. If anyone fell asleep, the bats got her. They stayed awake for days sometimes, if Charlie told them to.”

Mackenzie thought Daria had probably survived being attacked by the bats in the desert because she had the Spear of Destiny with her. It had likely not wanted her to die before reaching the oasis, for some reason, so it had awakened her before the little vampires finished their work. Maybe the vampires had also carried away Daria’s things on her journey here. Maybe there were mutant rats that collected human-made things. It didn’t matter now.

Mackenzie thought about the skinless man screaming in the desert. He had left that part of Jodie’s curse intact. “Something bad,” he said. “I might tell you about it someday.”

“No, don’t.” She scratched a bug bite on her knee. “I hope whatever happened to him was really bad.”

Mackenzie let go of the memory of the spear. He never thought of it again. “It’s beautiful out here,” he said.

She nodded. “There’s a place not far from here, about an hour or two by foot. It’s a lookout. It’s beautiful, too, but in a different way.”

Mackenzie thought there was something at Zabriskie Point that he would need to bury or remove, but it did not come to him what it was. He would take care of it when the time came.

Daria looked at the trees towering over the wall around the pool. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream, what happened?” she said.

“I feel like I should be remembering something really awful, but it’s hard to remember it. It feels like it never really happened.”

He frowned for a moment. “Hmmm, weird. I feel the same way, like… I don’t know. Something.”

“Everything looks the same as it always did, not like… I thought when… I can’t remember it now.”

“Yeah.” He sat up. “Could you show me around here? I don’t know anything about this place, just a little about what you said on the radio.”

“Sure.” Daria got to her feet. “I haven’t explored everything in the big building. We still have some time before it gets dark.”

“Not very. It might during the winter, but I haven’t been here that long.” She gestured to a gate in the wall around the pool. “Let’s go out that way. I’ll show you the apple tree.”

Above them, looking down from a patio wall atop a square tower, a woman with brunette hair watched them go. They never looked up and saw her. Her battered face and wounded body were healed. When the two young people disappeared into the trees below, the woman whispered goodbye to the auburn-haired girl, then changed shape and flew away in the form of a white praying mantis. In her right clawed hand she carried a black, corroding lance head of Roman manufacture. After an hour of flying through the mountains, she touched down on the cool bare rock of an unnamed peak in the wilderness and took the form of a woman again. From there she looked up at the stars that had just come out.

“Forgive me,” she said to the stars. “Please forgive me for everything I’ve done.”

The stars kept their silence but continued to look down. The Roman lance stayed on the mountaintop, hidden from the world but visible to the heavens, for a very long time.

You could say it's a nonsense world of Alice in Wonderland, but it makes a lot of sense.

—Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Manson Family (1971, interview, speaking of the Manson Family)

—Linda Kasabian, ex-member of Manson Family turned born-again Christian (1971, interview)

Camp Henry O. Flipper
Highland, Lubbock District, Western Territories
Free Christian Republic of Texas
Saturday morning, September 11, 1999

Being a commander had its rough moments, General Armalin reflected as he looked out from his third-floor office window. It was only with the greatest difficulty that members of the armed forces at Camp Flipper were persuaded to put their rifles and other firearms away—not because they were shooting at each other, but because they were firing their weapons into the air in celebration, and those injured by falling bullets were already flooding the camp hospital. The soldiers were more disciplined than the civilians, however, who in some cases had to be restrained or arrested and their weapons confiscated.

The jubilation went on unabated. Radios everywhere were tuned to a special broadcast from Austin, where President Winfrey was proclaiming September 11th as Salvation Day, a national day of celebration and religious services for Christians and Muslims alike. It marked the discovery that every zom there was had been disintegrated, with the added bonus of Texas being able to greet its first guests from the Combined Armed Forces of the United States, a previously unknown nation of Zom survivors from the west. A new millennium of peace at hand, she said. Peace, however, was greatly lacking no matter where in Highland Armalin looked. Guards had to be put around the USCAF helicopters to prevent the ecstatic populace from tearing the machines to pieces in a mad quest for souvenirs.

General Armalin watched the chaos and felt he had aged two decades in the two weeks he had been in the western wilderness. The profound joy and relief he felt with the ending of the Zom was tempered with awe and wonder that Lieutenant Mackenzie had somehow, against all odds, actually done it—but then had disappeared. And there had been so many other causalities besides, old friends too precious to lose now gone forever.

“You look too solemn,” said General Bradley. He sat in the same chair that Lieutenant Mackenzie had once used. In the huge general's hands was an open history book about Texas.

“We’ve got people flying over the area and searching it on foot,” said Bradley. “Something will turn up.”

“Hmmm.” Armalin listened to the occasional crack of gunfire echo over Highland. “Still wish he or that Daria would transmit something, just to let us know if…” He sighed and turned away from the window to take a seat at his desk. He poured another shot glass of Cuban rum for himself.

“I thought you said you didn’t drink when you were on duty,” said Bradley with a smile.

“The President gave me special permission, today only, as long as I didn’t embarrass myself or Texas.” Armalin downed the shot glass in one swallow. “I thought if I stayed indoors, I couldn’t do too much damage.”

“Working out the borders between our nations is going to be a bitch,” said Bradley. “People are going to spread out everywhere, and they probably already have. The highways are still dangerous, there’s all those ugly critters running around…” He sighed and looked down at the book to turn a page. “It’s a great time to be alive, though.”

Armalin poured a seventh shot glass of rum. “With her permission to drink, the President also gave me a new set of orders,” he said. “We’re going to rebuild an Interstate between Texas and California, and we have to do it before winter gets here. She’s sending the Adjutant General of the Joint Chiefs to oversee it personally.”

“She said she did. One of your military engineers, a General Claudia Grant, will be working with General Trainor. They’re going to start from each end of old Interstate 10 and try to meet somewhere in the middle for a Golden Spike moment.

“Politicians.” Bradley shook his head with a bemused smile. “I’m never in the loop these days.”

“I know the feeling.” Armalin toyed with his shot glass, still filled with rum. “I was informed just before you came in that our countries might soon start work on a nuclear program together. I’m not crazy about making more bombs, especially since we don’t have—”

“It’s for nuclear power plants, not bombs. We don’t need bombs anymore. At least I hope we won’t.”

“I hope so, too,” said Armalin, “and that also proves my point: I’m out of the loop.”

“We’re flying in Dr. Lawrence next week. He was with the space program before the White Plague came, and now he’s our top nuclear expert. He’s the best we have. We could have nuclear power online within a decade.”

“I remember him.” Armalin seemed less bothered now. “He was Air Force, right? Manned Orbiting Laboratory program? Yeah. Sorry he didn’t get to the Moon after all. Anyway, I can hardly complain about getting more electric power out in the rural areas. We could use it.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose. “General, I’ve always—”

Armalin chuckled. “That will take getting used to. I’ve heard stories about you ever since I was a kid. Not in the papers, of course, but word got around.”

“I bet they do.” Armalin’s grin faded and he looked more serious. “I was saying that I’ve always considered myself a rational man—not an atheist, no, but a believer in logic and reason. The universe operates on the basis of law. There are mysteries, of course, and so much we don’t understand about the world and space, but I always thought that every ‘how’ or ‘why’ we asked had a reasonable answer.” He drank down the rum and set the glass on his desk with a thump. “Now, I don’t know. Daria’s transcript doesn’t illuminate what happened, what she knew of the Zom, or how Lieutenant Mackenzie was able to end it at last. I had a feeling he could do it—one of the most reliable, determined, and good-natured young men you could ever hope to find—but I’d still like to know how he did it, and where he is now.”

Bradley closed the book in his hands and set it aside. “He was a very single-minded young man at that. Anyone who would trigger an atomic attack just so he could finish his mission is a fellow to be reckoned with.”

“I hadn’t actually believed he would do that. Damn. I recall telling him he was to use any means at all to accomplish his task, but bombing his own side was not a course of action I had considered he would take.”

Bradley shrugged in a good-natured way. “It worked, and no one died. I’m not going to hold a grudge.”

Armalin laughed again, then sighed. He eyed the rum bottle but made no move toward it. “I don’t think I mentioned that it was the lieutenant’s idea to do that, Isaiah.”

“You didn’t,” Bradley agreed. “You’ve also mentioned a few things I don’t recall telling you. Are you a telepath, or is your espionage done by magic?”

Armalin thought it over. “I’m a telepath, yes, but a limited one with a few other minor talents. Nothing terribly big. Yourself?”

“No, not counting that serum I took half a century ago, but—” Bradley reached up and took a tiny device from one ear “—I do maintain a link to a young girl who works in our Special Operations department. She’s a teenager named Raven Baxter who sometimes has visions of the future—in limited ways, I might add. She warned me about the bomb and said someone in your force had caused it to happen, but he was not a traitor or an evil man.”

Armalin shook his head in admiration. “I’d trade you if I could. Being a telepath is nothing but trouble some days.”

“No, thanks. Raven’s been too big a help. We might find other ways to share our resources, though.”

“Some parts more than others. Speaking of happier things, would it be possible for me to visit Avalon one of these days?”

Bradley grinned. “Whatever day Madam President lets you take leave, I’ll fly you there myself. The Channel Islands are beautiful. Thank God we had them to evacuate to when the Zom hit. I think everyone there’s ready to move back to the mainland. It was getting crowded there the last few years. We should stop at Edwards Air Force Base, too. I think you’ll like the U-2s.”

“We spied on everyone, but it didn’t do us much good.” Bradley leaned back in his chair. “We got locked into a permanent state of paranoia. Between the Zom and that nuclear plant melting down, chemical pollution from plant explosions and train wrecks, all the craziness of the times, we didn’t want to attract attention to ourselves—and we didn’t want anyone to come looking for us, given the dangers of the area. We hid away on those islands and in those isolated air bases for too long.”

“Thank God, yes you did. Now maybe we have a real chance to build a world where children are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, per the good Dr. King.”

“Amen.” Armalin stared at the rum bottle, then capped it and put it away. “I’d still love to know how the Zom happened,” he said with a somber look. “And what happened to the good Lieutenant Mackenzie. Major Mackenzie, rather, if he ever comes back and gets his promotion.”

General Bradley looked at the other man for a long thoughtful moment, then took a deep breath. “I assume this room is secure?”

“Kyle,” said Bradley with an equally somber expression, “in honor of the moment we are blessed to be a part of, I will violate my personal oath of secrecy to the former United States government and tell you what I think happened out there. I might even have had something to do with it, a long time ago in another war. You’ll probably read it in my mind while I’m talking, but I can live with that.”

Armalin blinked, looking dumbfounded. “You’re… you’re thinking that—”

“When I was fighting in Europe in the Second World War, back in the day when I wore that old red, white, and blue costume and people called me Cap, I found out that Hitler had a secret device that gave him great mystical power. He could have used it to mentally control any Allied force that landed in Europe. It was my job to find that device and get it out of Hitler’s hands before D-Day. Another Cap went in, a white one, but he was killed in action. I succeeded, but the device went missing again while being transported by Army personnel. All trace of it was lost. If that’s what caused the Zom, as you term it, then the so-called Satan hypothesis I’ve heard so much about was true: someone was using supernatural powers from that device to start the Zom and keep it going all this time. Your man was probably the one who took him down. There’s almost a religious aspect to it.”

“The archangel Michael,” said Armalin in a low voice. “The lieutenant’s first name was Michael.”

“The archangel who fought Satan and won, as told in the Book of Revelations. If the device I found long ago was the cause of all this, we had better keep an eye out for it in the future. I also doubt very much we will ever see Michael Mackenzie again.” General Bradley leaned forward on his chair. “Kyle, have you ever heard of the Spear of Destiny?”

Sergeant Freeman scratched Spike behind the ears as they sat together behind a truck in the motor pool parking lot. The screams of joy from every part of Highland could be heard clearly, but Freeman was content to sit in the shade and relax, or at least try to.

Freeman groaned as he turned his head—but his disappointment at being found was wiped out by the face he saw. “Captain!” he said, getting to his feet. “You made it!”

Captain Rhodes, in civilian dress, grinned as he strode over and shook Freeman’s hand. “Hell, yeah! Private Reed and I got away from the Landons at Holloman. I thought we were going to have to walk back home, but those new guys from California came down and found us.” His grin ended with a tense look. “The others didn’t make it. I hope we find the Landons one of these days and pay them back.”

“I hope so, too. I had a hundred-dollar bet with someone that I’d be the one to do it, too, but—”

Freeman’s smile evaporated. “Yeah. Kinda lets me off the hook, since he’s not here to pay up.”

“Forget it. This isn’t a day to worry about it. Who’s your friend here?”

“This is Spike. Got him in California. He’s got me trained to scratch behind his ears on command.”

Rhodes laughed. “Look, why are you hiding back here? They want to give you a dozen medals but no one knows where the hell you are. Everyone’s been looking for—oh, wait, never mind. I get it.”

“Yeah,” said Freeman unhappily. “If you wouldn’t mention where I am, sir, I’d appreciate it. All the attention got to be a little much.”

“Can’t imagine why. Listen, why don’t you and your pal here come back to my place? Some of us are getting together for a cookout.”

Freeman looked uncertain. “Well… I dunno, I’m kinda tired from everything, worried about the lieutenant and what happened to him and all, but—”

“All right, Christ on a pogo stick, you can bring your stash, too! Just come!”

Freeman still looked uncomfortable. “I’m actually trying to quit smoking so much. I think it made me a little too paranoid, you know?”

Rhodes pulled out the heavy artillery. “We’re having ribs, Freeman. Spike can have some, too. He looks a little thin.”

The sergeant grimaced, feeling his firm resolve start to melt. “Barbecued? Texas style?”

“Wear what you’ve got on, or borrow something from my closet. No one cares, not today anyway.”

“Jesus, man. Okay, fine, you win. Let’s go, Spike. I believe we’ve been invited to dinner.”

As the two men and the dog left the motor pool through a back gateway to avoid the crowds, Rhodes snapped his fingers. “Oh, I was going to ask you something,” he said to Freeman. “Are you up for another road trip?”

“Calm down, it’s not for a couple weeks. You and the Old Man are the only people who know what’s west of us, and he’s got too much else to do. We’re rebuilding a highway to California and need some expert advice, and your name came up in—”

“Fuck, man, are you crazy? Shit, don’t you remember what we had to go through? Man-eating monsters, A-bombs, zoms out to the horizon, vampire bats, all that end-of-the-world shit? Jesus, man!”

Captain Rhodes raised his hands as if surrendering. “Okay, okay, we’ll talk about it after the ribs.”

Freeman’s rant was derailed by an approaching vision of seductive beauty. A gorgeous woman in revealing civilian clothes waved as she walked toward them. Her blouse was unbuttoned to her solar plexus. She was not wearing a bra.

“What a surprise!” said Rhodes grandly. “Captain Coffin’s here! Ma’am, this is Sergeant Freeman. I promised him he wouldn’t have to say ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ if he went with us to the party.”

“Sergeant Freeman and I have already met,” purred the gorgeous woman. “We were at Needles Airport.”

Freeman forced himself to stop peeking down the captain’s cleavage. “Uh, hello again, uh, ma’am,” he said, awkwardly putting out a hand. “I, uh, I’m sorry I’m not like dressed up or anything, but—”

“No problem at all!” said Captain Coffin in a throaty voice. She ignored Freeman’s hand and instead took him by the arm. “As long as we’re off-duty, you can call me Coffey. All my friends do. I didn’t get a chance to talk with you after the bomb went off. I bet you have so many stories to tell me at the party. Has Rhodey—um, Captain Rhodes told you about that project to build a road to California?”

Freeman stared at Coffey’s bright smile and stupendous cleavage, then turned and glared hard at the grinning Rhodes. “I’ll get you for this, you asshole,” Freeman growled. “You’re going down like a one-wing airplane. I fucking mean it, man.”

“Of course you do, of course you do,” said Rhodes soothingly, “but let’s have some barbecued ribs and a few beers first, get comfortable, feed your dog, and then we’ll have a chat about your future.” He gave Freeman a push to start him walking again as Coffey cuddled up on Freeman’s other side. Spike licked his nose and trotted happily along behind. As they went they passed a radio on someone’s front porch. The radio was tuned to a hundred-thousand-watt Manhattan Island station and had its volume turned all the way up.

“Give thanks, my brothers and sisters!” cried the voice on the radio. “Give thanks to Allah the Merciful, who gave us the strength to go on! He put fire in our bellies and steel in our backs! He saw fit to protect us from the Devil’s Plague, and then saw fit to destroy our enemies and set us free! Give thanks, brothers and sisters, for when all others have fallen—WE REMAIN!”