Rise Again by Ben Tripp Page B

well back, and the weight of the man’s legs was enough to push the door open a few inches. One of his sneakered feet fell through the gap. Danny saw the shoes were chewed up—he must have run a long way over some prettyrough terrain. She remembered the shoeless foot of the corpse in the woods, bloody and matted with dirt. Danny swung the door all the way open and stepped back again. If he was going to try to kick somebody, she didn’t want to make it easy.
    But he didn’t kick. He didn’t breathe. He lay there on the hard plastic seat, unmistakably dead.
    “Ted, put on some gloves and check his vitals, but I think he’s gone,” Danny said. “Artie, you got a tarp or a sheet or something we can put over him for the drive down Main Street? I don’t want any lookie-loos. They’ll think we beat him to death.”
    “Rabies,” said Artie.
    Nick drove the body back toward the Sheriff’s Station. It was concealed beneath a vinyl advertising banner that proclaimed Cleanest Gas in Town , a gift from the Chevron corporation. “ Only Gas in Town” would have sufficed. Danny rode shotgun; Ted could walk back once he was done taking statements. Do him some good. They were halfway there, along where the first houses sprouted up to signal a human settlement was ahead, when the radio went crazy. Park had patched through the transmissions coming from the flatlands so he could explain what they were hearing.
    “This is happening everywhere,” the highway patrolman said, his voice cutting in over the rest. “People are running around and falling down dead, like up here. But a lot more of them.”
    Beneath Park’s words, a continuous din of voices crossed and recrossed as law and order attempted to get a handle on the situation. At first it was confusion, the formless back-and-forth of a vast network of individual radios and incidents that could only be followed once you could separate one conversation from the rest. It took Danny twenty seconds before she could sort out any of it.
    “We got ten or more down here on Crenshaw,” someone said.
    “More like fifty,” the same voice amended a few seconds later.
    Then another voice:
    “They’re running straight up Highland, must be a thousand. Lot of them falling. Something’s in pursuit—can’t see what. We’re driving by.”
    “The Costco parking lot looks like a battlefield, there’s hundreds,” said another.
    And then:
    “Jesus, it’s coming this way.”
    Officer Park interjected: “This situation is happening from L.A. to at least Claremont. I should get back down there, please advise, over.”
    Danny was about to reply, the handset at her lips, when a woman in bra and panties ran past the police car, screaming.
    A lanky man with a beard, dressed as if for a hike, charged after the woman. He was also screaming.
    “Hit the gas,” Danny said. They had to cut these people off before they got to the crowded part of Main Street, or there could be a panic.
    Patrick and Weaver were about ready to give up pretending to look at the crafts booths. The atmosphere had gotten very weird—the most distinct case of “bad vibes” Patrick had ever experienced, with the exception of one evening at a nightclub in Idaho. The phone calls had continued, and then people bundling their families into cars and driving away too fast through the one lane open along Main Street.
    Two-thirds of the crowd was oblivious to this undercurrent of alarm, but more people were figuring out something was wrong by the second. And the number was expanding exponentially because now people were honking their horns and cutting each other off with their vehicles.
    “Let’s go,” Patrick said. Typically, Weaver would have taken his time to respond, putting on a show of unflappable cool, but this time he simply nodded and set out through the crowd. By the time they were near the motor home, half the crowd was in on the excitement, those who hadn’t gotten phone calls now overhearing what the others