The gunfight lasted eleven minutes. The last of the soldiers fled the cavern, running from the killers who came hunting them in the steel corridor. They ran for safety into the camp.
Where all of the freed prisoners were waiting.
—21—
The Quick and the Dead
When it was over the survivors had to go around with knives and kill the soldiers they killed. Reanimation was a fact of life. Everyone who died, no matter how they died, came back to life within minutes.
Ledger, Top, and Tom came out of the cavern to find Bunny directing the cleanup. Ledger walked past him to where Ike Black had climbed to his feet and was taking his first steps as one of the living dead. Ledger slung his stolen rifle and flicked the Wilson’s blade into place again. He stopped, though, and let the zombie shamble toward him.
“I ought to let you stay this way,” Ledger told him. “Kick your ass out of here and let you wander until you rotted away.”
The zombie tried to moan, but the damage to its throat was too severe.
“You thought you were so fucking smart,” said Ledger. “King under the mountain. Shit, I had this whole plan about pretending to join and working my way up to be your right-hand man and then putting two in the back of your head when no one was looking. I was going to take over this whole operation and maybe make something legitimate of it. But you know what?”
The zombie shuffled closer.
“It’d be too damn much like polishing a turd.”
The dead general reached for him.
“Besides… as it turns out,” said Ledger quietly, “you were no general at all. You’re nothing. Not before you died and not now. If me and my boys hadn’t come along, someone else would have taken you down.”
Ledger batted aside the hands and caught Black by the throat in an iron grip. The dead mouth snapped but Black had no angle for a bite.
“Just between you and me, Ike old buddy,” said Ledger, “I’m kind of glad I get to kill you twice.”
He stabbed Ike Black through one eye and then the other, and then he swept his arm over and down, driving the blade like a spike through the top of the zombie’s skull. The motor cortex died, shorting out the lingering nerve conduction that gave the undead thing its mobility. All tension went out of Black’s body and he fell like a scarecrow knocked from its post.
Ledger stepped aside to let Ike Black sprawl face-first in the mud.
Around him the prisoners were finishing the cleanup with a relish that was every bit as ghoulish and vicious as the things they were killing. Ledger couldn’t blame them.
He went back to the others and pulled Top and then Bunny into fierce embraces. They all laughed and there were tears in their eyes. The stories of how and where and why and what would come later. For now they stood in the glow of a miracle. They had survived when so much of the world had not. Impossibly, they were alive. Impossibly they were all here.
“What do we do now?” asked Tom when they all stopped laughing and backslapping and shaking hands.
They looked at the milling crowds. Top said, “The cure’s phony?”
“Completely,” said Ledger.
“Fuck,” said Bunny. “Once these folks get their shit together they’re going to be hurt by that. A cure… shit, that’s what brought us out here.”
“I know,” said Ledger, “the truth doesn’t always set you free.”
“Do you think Dr Pisani can be helped?” asked Tom. “Maybe she can come back to… well, to herself.”
“What good would that do?” asked Bunny, “if she’s flipped her gourd, I mean.”
Ledger said, “Black mentioned something about research Monica McReady was doing. Remember her?”
Top and Bunny nodded. “She still alive?” asked Top.
“Unknown. She had a lab somewhere in Death Valley, but I don’t know where it was and Pisani lost her shit when McReady stopped transmitting. But…”
He let it hang but the others nodded.
“Worth a try,” said Top.
“Anything’s worth a try,” agreed Bunny.
“I’m going to try for it,” said Ledger. “Go see if I can find McReady, or at least her notes, and bring what I can back to Dr Pisani. This place may have been a big fat lie but maybe we can change that and—”
The earth beneath them rumbled and they whirled to see the heavy door begin descending again.
“No!” bellowed Ledger and he pelted toward the cavern. The others ran with him, and Tom outran them all. He was twice as fast as the older men and he reached the cavern well before them.
But not in time.
The door closed with a boom that echoed off the rocky walls of the canyon.
There was a keypad outside, but none of them knew the code. Everyone who did was either dead, or inside the mountain.
“It was Pisani,” gasped Tom. “I saw her. She bent down to look out as the door closed. It was her.”
A moment later all of the electric lights in the camp went out.
The four men and the survivors spent a full day trying to find another way in. By the end of that day Bunny saw smoke rising from a hidden vent. It was black, oily smoke and it poured out with fury and funneled high into the sky.
No one ever managed to get inside, and after a while they stopped trying. The smoke told them what they would find.
They stayed with the survivors for a week, helping them organize, advising them, giving each of them some training.
Then the four men left Oro Valley. They came to a crossroads. A real one, though the metaphor was not lost on any of them.
“I’ve got to get home,” said Tom. “My brother’s back in Mountainside, and I’ve been away too long.”
“Yeah,” agreed Ledger. “My dogs are there.”
“What’s with you and dogs?” asked Bunny. “You were always about dogs.”
“I trust dogs,” said Ledger.
Bunny thought about that. Nodded.
Tom said, “Do you and Top want to come with us? There’s plenty of room and we could always use a couple of fighters.”
Top ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. He glanced down the road that led northwest. “I heard there was something maybe starting in Asheville, North Carolina,” he said. “Big refugee camp there and some folks making a stab at building something new. Maybe a new government.”
“Or maybe something as bad as this,” said Ledger.
“Maybe,” said Top. “But… I kind of feel we have to go look.”
“Yeah,” said Bunny, “if there’s even a chance it’s for real, then they’re going to need guys like us.”
“We could use you in our town,” said Tom.
“They got you, kid,” said Top. “And you handle yourself pretty good.”
Ledger felt like his heart was being torn out of his chest. He needed to go with Tom. He needed to go with his friends.
The moment stretched and they stood there in the heat of a cloudless morning.
Finally Top grinned at Bunny and said, “You know, Farm Boy, I’m not at all sure Captain Ledger ought to be left all on his own like that. Who knows what trouble he’d get hisself into.”
“You think we need to hold his hand and keep him from wiping his ass with poison ivy?” asked Bunny.
“Hey,” said Ledger. They ignored him.
“He’s as likely to get his dick bite off by a zombie as he is to walk off a cliff,” said Top. “How many times we have to drag his broken ass out of some firefight and carry him all the way to intensive care?”
“I can’t count that high,” Bunny said, nodding sagely.
“You guys are hilarious,” said Ledger.
“I’m missing the joke,” said Tom. “What are you saying?”
Top adjusted the straps on his pack, but Bunny answered. “What the old man’s saying is that we’ll make sure you kids get home safe from the prom. Then we’ll go see what kind of trouble we can get into down south. Sound like a plan?”