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Then, like a grenade being tossed into the middle of it all, a voice boomed out with such strident force that everyone—gang members, townies, Claudia and Rachael, and even the undead Kyle—paused in their acts of murder and turned toward a figure standing at the edge of the clearing. He was tall, muscular, heavily armed, and there was some kind of armored creature with him. Maybe a dog. Maybe a warg, for all Rachael knew. The world was crazy enough. The man’s words echoed like thunder.
“What in the wide blue fuck is going on around here?”
Rachael’s heart leapt in her chest. She knew that voice.
She knew the man.
She even knew the monster dog.
“Joe!” she screamed.
— 36 —
HAPPY VALLEY
The woman came down from the wall to meet them. She was tall and as slender as a rake handle and stood in that peculiar attitude Dahlia had seen used by some of the mothers of the richest and prettiest girls in school. A sort of slouch of the shoulders while keeping her head up at a disapproving angle; one hand on her hip and her pelvis cocked forward. It looked uncomfortable and Dahlia had no idea what it was supposed to convey.
“Mr. Deacon,” she said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Margaret Van Sloane of the—”
“Of the Hewlett Bay Van Sloanes,” Church said, cutting in smoothly. “I thought so. A pleasure, Margaret. I knew Bryce Van Sloane quite well.”
“Bryce? Oh, how lovely. He was my uncle. Did you do business with him?”
“Our paths crossed a few times,” said Church smoothly. “He was very sharp. A killer in business.” He offered his hand and took Van Sloane’s birdlike hand in his, giving it a delicate shake.
Dahlia had to resist rolling her eyes. She thought he was laying it on a bit thick. On the other hand, the skinny hag seemed to be eating it up.
The whistles were blowing in odd patterns now, some closer and others farther away. Margert Van Sloane flinched at the sound.
“How many of these . . . Rovers . . . are coming?” she asked.
“A hundred at least,” said Church, “and possibly many more.” Church quickly explained about the Rovers—that they started out as a biker gang and grew into a horde in the months since the dead rose. He laid this part on thick, too, telling Van Sloane about the trophies and the brutality of the gang. Dahlia watched what his words did to the woman. Without being explicit, Church made it clear that they were, to all intents and purposes, the Visigoths and Happy Valley was Rome on its last day.
The Pack clustered together near the gates, and several of the guards seemed to be watching them more closely than what was happening on the other side of the wall.
While Church spoke, Dahlia looked around. Happy Valley looked like something out of a brochure for an upscale real estate brokerage. There were streets lined with lush trees, and houses that, though cookie-cutter, were individually beautiful. Two and three stories, with lots of gables and stained-glass dormers and fancy brickwork.
It was weirdly orderly to her, because everywhere she’d been since the catastrophe had been changed in one way or another. Whole cities, towns, and villages had been the scenes of slaughter and conflict where bullet holes pocked all the walls and doors, where cars stood in awkward positions in the roads or smashed into one another, or were left where they’d died when the EMPs fired. Bloodstains were everywhere, and you could barely walk without stepping in a patch of dried gore or on spent shell casings. Some towns were wholly given over to the living dead, with the gray people randomly wandering the streets or standing like grotesquely vigilant tombstones near the places where they died. Other towns belonged only to ghosts and to the animals that had come searching for food. A few had become armed forts where desperate groups of survivors struggled day-to-day for enough to eat and a safe piece of ground on which to sleep. There was nowhere in the world of living people that remained unchanged because the world itself had irrevocably changed. How could anything not reflect that?
Except here, in Happy Valley, there was no sign of that catastrophe.
The lawns were green and trimmed, the hedges sculpted to geometric perfection, the trees shady and lovely, the streets clean, the pavement swept. None of the houses were burned shells; there was no sign of violence of any kind. The residents were even well-dressed and well-groomed, with clean nails and expensive haircuts and fine jewelry.
That’s what Dahlia saw first. It was so compelling an ima
ge that she felt momentarily displaced, disconnected from her own understanding of reality. How could this be here? Even with the walls and the protective geography, how could the end of the world not have touched Happy Valley?
She heard Church and Van Sloane talking. Heard them discuss the defenses, the threat, the coming fight, and it seemed unreal. Like that belonged in a much different story than this.
And then . . .
As if the universe was tired of its joke and wanted to hurt with a cruel punch line, she looked past the obvious and saw a bit deeper. A young man stood on the lawn of one of the closest houses. Not in the center of the lawn, not like he owned the place, but to one side, standing partly obscured by a hedge. By, in fact, the hedge he had been working on, a pair of clippers in his hands. He was a black man, much thinner than the other residents, dressed in grass-stained jeans and a plain T-shirt.
Why he caught her eye, and what was different about him, was not immediately obvious. Then Dahlia saw two other people, both Latinas, carrying bags of trash out to a wheeled cart. They grunted as they swung the heavy bags up. One paused to drag a forearm across her brow to wipe away sweat. They also wore jeans and plain T-shirts. Their hair was not expensively coifed, and they wore no jewelry of any kind. They wore sandals and gave furtive looks, meeting no one’s eyes.
Then Dahlia saw the guards. A pair of young white men with sunglasses were pacing along the street. At first Dahlia thought they were coming to reinforce the walls, but that wasn’t it at all. Instead they looked left and right as they walked, glancing at the black man trimming the hedges and the brown women hauling trash. And at others. A skinny white kid in ragged jeans with long unkempt hair and lots of tattoos who was pushing a broom along the street. A heavyset black woman with two white children in a stroller. An Arab with a wheelbarrow full of freshly picked vegetables. The guards looked at them and maintained their stares until each worker, in turn, paused and nodded.
The nods were small, but definite, and they troubled Dahlia. They looked like bows. Like statements of obedience. None of the people who bowed were smiling. The Arab man had a bandage across the bridge of his nose. The heavyset black woman had pink scars on her arms. The tattooed white man had the raccoon eyes you get with a broken nose.
