Rise Again Below Zero (23 page)

The remorse beat at her; she’d left the idiots under her command to whatever fate the world decided to hand out. Her old friends, the Silent Kid, those still-missing kids. She’d abandoned her post. Nobody should be in a position of such responsibility they could fuck up so many lives just by falling prey to a little sentimentality for their own damn sister. It had happened before, when she thought her group was safe and she’d gone off on her own to seek out Kelley. Now she’d left them again, and again for Kelley. The results would probably be equally disastrous.

Danny siphoned gas out of a farm truck into the interceptor, ignoring the raging thirst that was turning her mouth into cigarette ash. Then she went in search of water.

There was a pump in the yard of the ranch house, an old-fashioned model with a long cast-iron handle. Danny considered seeing if the taps in the house worked, but she kept having visions of another charnel pit of blood and flies. She decided to see if the hand pump would work. She pushed and pulled at the resistant handle until there was stinking sweat pouring out of her, and at long last it barked, croaked, belched up rusty sludge, then jets of reddish water, and then the water ran clean and cold. Danny hadn’t cleared the ranch house or barns for zeroes, but she didn’t care right now. She’d see them coming across the yard. She sluiced the icy water over her skin, raising goose bumps. Gasped and blew and stuck her head under the stream. Then she pumped a couple of gallon jugs full, drank nearly half of one of them, refilled it, and turned to go back to the interceptor.

A zero was standing beside the vehicle.

It had been a tall black man once; now it was gunmetal-colored. The thing’s clothing was stained and rotten. Wherever Danny could see exposed skin, it was covered in masses of tissue that looked like red grapes. They burst through the thing’s rags and hung in heavy fist-sized bunches. For some reason, the zero didn’t seem to be attracted to Danny. It just stared at the police car.

“Hey,” Danny called, placing a jug at her feet and drawing her gun.

The zero turned its shrunken gray eyes toward her, then stumbled in her direction. Danny raised the weapon. Her hands shook terribly but it was an easy shot.

“Kiiiimuh,” the zero moaned through its swollen face.

Danny hesitated. It was a thinker. Or almost a thinker.

“Kiii—muh,” it said again, and fell to its knees. It was facing her, eyes fixed on hers. Then it lowered its head, offering its skull to her. Danny saw that the things growing out of its skin were translucent and had dark, wormlike filaments inside. Her stomach lurched. She tasted acid in her throat.

“Can you understand me?” Danny said.

The thing did not respond. Danny stood there a long time, squinting past her gun at the bowed head of the zero. The thing raised one blistered finger and pressed it to its own temple.

“Kiiii—muh.”

Danny squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered the crown of the head, making a star-shaped hole, and black debris spurted out of its mouth; the zero fell on its side. She looked around the ranch and didn’t see anything else coming for her. She was cold again. She holstered her weapon, picked up a jug of water, and got back into the interceptor.

Kill me.
That’s what it had been trying to say.

•   •   •

The White Whale looked like a mirage. Danny watched it through her binoculars.

Earlier, she had made a detour to the northeast, revisiting the radioactive train wreck. There was an iPhone Geiger counter—an accessory that had become popular on the West Coast when Japan had its meltdown—in the trunk of the interceptor, and she kept the thing charged. Lots of people had them now—the scouts all carried one. At the scene of the wreck, it had registered more radiation than the device could express. It was absurd, but she’d held her breath and run toward the derailed cars with one hand thrown up in front of her face as if the radiation was just heat from a fire.

Now she wasn’t far from the place she had left the Tribe. The zeroes that had attacked the Vandals had returned to the swarm, apparently; on the interstate she saw some ravaged human remains and a few inanimate zeroes, but none moving. Taking the exit onto that minor road required more courage than it did to confront the seething invisible death inside the ruptured containment car.

She didn’t expect the Tribe to be where she’d last seen it, between the slaughterhouse and the church; they would have gone east long before then. But she was still a couple of kilometers away when she saw the glitter
of window glass far down the road. She pulled over and climbed unsteadily onto the hood of the vehicle and used her binoculars to see what lay ahead. She saw a boxy shape that had to be the White Whale, and many smaller vehicles before and behind it. It looked as if the entire Tribe was still sitting there, a week later (or however long it had been). She was too far away to be certain but she thought she saw human figures moving around.

So she rolled on up the road, heart pounding with fear that she would be rejected by the very people she had spent so long sneering at for their weakness.

She was going back to apologize to the people who had destroyed her sister.

But she couldn’t gain access to the anger.

Somehow she’d always known Kelley’s strange existence could not end well. Kelley herself had predicted she would murder Danny—what happened after that? A shot through the head, same as what actually did happen. She went out with a gut full of human flesh either way. That had always been the plan.

Danny
wanted
to blame the chooks. She wanted it all to be their fault. But she simply could not. Maybe it was the eternal hangover.

She spotted what she thought was a familiar face—one of the civilians from the Tribe, wandering around alone.

But as she drove closer, she saw it was a zero. Once a Tribesperson. A woman who had been wounded in the fighting. How had she come to this place? Why had she not been delivered out of the world on a bullet?

Danny was perplexed. Thinking about it made her head hurt even worse; tears were leaking out of her eyes. Not tears of grief, but of pain. Maybe both. Mostly pain. The thing was half a kilometer from the back of the convoy, and must have been wandering around aimlessly since the fight. Danny rolled to a halt beside it, rolled her window down. The zero hissed and opened its jaws. She shot it on the fifth try, her hand shaking although she rested it across the frame of the door. The noise of the gunshots set her ears ringing, and they didn’t stop. Now she couldn’t hear properly. She was going to have to be very careful with her senses as dull as they were.

Her thoughts kept uselessly returning to the matter of what she ought to have done, and what she would do next. Why hadn’t she skipped the drinking game and just gone back and made amends? Two years back, it would have been pride. But this was something else. She figured it was something between shame and fear. It was her job to go back to the Tribe and seek forgiveness.
She didn’t expect to be nominated to lead them again, of course, and she didn’t want the job. Maybe she wouldn’t even be allowed to ride with them anymore. It didn’t matter
how
they responded. She hoped only to be understood by anyone with enough sense to see what kind of a situation she’d been put in, and maybe for someone to say they understood. Maybe. She wanted some kind of absolution.

But she was afraid nobody would understand. She didn’t know how to apologize. She might get it wrong. She might not find any words at all.

•   •   •

There were a lot of crows in the sky. That meant undead. Dread was settling over her heart as she approached the convoy. When she reached that fatal battleground, it shocked her to see how hastily the Tribe had abandoned the scene: There were Vandal corpses strewn where they fell, and empty vehicles scattered along the road at all angles. It was clear they’d packed up and left in a hurry. Danny saw one leather-clad zero, a biker in life, making its way across the slaughterhouse lot. A couple of hunters emerged from the bushes in front of the church—right where the Silent Kid had been trying to go. She’d known them in life, too, ordinary scared people, now hunched, vicious things, scuttling along the parking lot so as to remain alongside the interceptor, in case she stepped out. But they didn’t come close. Smarter than the moaners. One was the driver of the shuttle bus, Sue Baxter.

Danny stopped the interceptor alongside the White Whale and opened the door. Put a foot on the ground. The hunters froze, their sunken eyes fixed on her position. She waited, and saw them begin to move. They slunk crabwise toward a motorcycle that lay crumpled on its side and crouched down behind it. She could still see them, but this was instinct. Like cats. The aching in her head was expanding with every heartbeat. She didn’t want to wait—she wanted to gun the things down and be done with it, find out what happened to the Tribe. But she couldn’t move around with hunters nearby.
Not without Kelley at my side
, she thought.

There was a noise off to her left. Danny searched around among the parked vehicles of the Tribe and saw a moaner working its way down the line. A Vandal with a wide cut in its throat. Again, Danny wondered where the mercy shots had been. She needed answers, and fast. As she scanned the area, she realized there were a lot of the undead around, attracted by her arrival, and if she wanted to solve anything, she had to work quickly, headache be damned.

She decided to take the risk. Hooked a fresh magazine from the backpack,
checked the load in her pistol, and got all the way out of the car. The hunters were galvanized; one sprinted, low to the ground, toward the line of vehicles ahead; it wanted to get around behind her while the other stalked in front. She loosed several rounds at it and got lucky—its leg buckled, and the thing was left cackling incoherently on the ground, unable to get under cover. She ignored it, turning her attention to the RV instead. There was something written on the bullet-pocked windshield; she could see it backward through the open passenger door. She chanced leaving the cover of the interceptor’s bulk, keeping one eye on the zero still hunkered down behind the motorcycle, and made her way around until she could read the message.

All down the convoy, there were more undead emerging from the shadows. They were looking for ways into the cars and trucks, probably attracted by the strong scent of humans that hung around them. Most were unknown; a few were once Tribespeople. They were pawing the windows, groping along the sides, looking for openings. Danny wondered briefly if the living humans were hidden inside their rides, heads down, but that was absurd. They would have fought back.

The convoy was deserted. She was the last living Tribesperson here.

Suddenly, the still-mobile hunter—the revenant of Sue Baxter—was far closer than Danny expected—a few yards away, sucking the air to get the smell of her, almost to the interceptor. She’d let her attention slide. She fired the pistol and the thing’s jaw snapped sideways. A second shot brought it down. The ringing in her ears increased.

There were more of them, more than she had bullets, coming on as fast as they could move their clumsy limbs. No further hunters, at least. No thinkers in evidence. She looked up at the broad, flat face of the White Whale and read the message scrawled there in soap:

PROPERTY OF THE TRIBE

BRB

Danny went back and locked herself inside the interceptor, then drove along the file of vehicles, using the overrider on the bumper to shove the zeroes out of the way as they came on. Scaly hands clawed at the windows. One of the undead had a short length of pipe in its hand, but it lacked the coordination to strike effectively. There was a clank on the roof and that was all. She ran the wounded hunter over.

Now that she could see the entire convoy, she realized most of the high-capacity vehicles were missing—the shuttle bus and others like it were gone, although the White Whale remained behind, probably because several of its massive tires had been shot to pieces in the combat. It only carried one spare. So the living had gone away, packed together like sardines in the minimum number of machines, with hardly any luggage—most of the gear was still inside or on top of the vehicles they’d left behind.

She felt a vast loneliness rising up around her like the wings of a gigantic bird. She had again forsaken the people she knew in the world, and they had done their part and gone away themselves. Wulf was dead.

It was only her and the zeroes and thousands of square miles of empty landscape.

They must have hightailed it to the train depot, probably led by Topper, and caught a train or walked from there. Somewhere to the east, anyway. Where were the nearest living human beings? The guards watching the train line, probably. Maybe those anonymous travelers who had gotten off the courtesy shuttle when Mike the kidnapper showed up.

That’s when Danny saw him.

It was sheer coincidence that Mike happened to be in her mind when she passed the foremost vehicle in the convoy and saw something dark and shapeless hanging from the slaughterhouse sign beside it. The sign stood on a massive arm of galvanized steel, tall enough to drive a tractor-trailer under it. Amalgamated Rendering, the big black letters proclaimed. Beef, Mutton. There was antipigeon wire along the top of the sign, like a bottle brush.

Beneath it hung a dead man. Danny would not have guessed it was Mike, except for his clothing and shoes. His hands were cuffed together behind him. His face was contorted, eggplant-colored, his neck twice as long as it should have been, a bundle of taut cords cinched in at the jaw by a noose.

“Holy fuck,” Danny breathed, leaning forward as she drove past the effigy until her head touched the steering wheel. Then it was out of view behind the roof.

Whoever had hung Mike there must have climbed a ladder. Or they’d used the telephone line repair truck’s extendable bucket.

In addition to stringing up the prisoner, someone had spray-painted a message over the lettering on the sign:

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO KIDNAPERS

It didn’t occur to Danny to cut him down. There were too many zeroes following her path down the convoy. He wasn’t going to be any less dead. She’d burned Kelley’s body and she’d burned Wulf’s, as well, on a pyre of boards from the shed doused in sweet liqueurs. Mike would have to wait for the crows to release him from bondage.