Rise Again Below Zero (39 page)

“It’s pretty fucking clear. But listen, I’m not fit for a couple days, maybe a week. There’s some shit wrong with my head. And before I do anything, I’ll need some things,” Danny said. “And no more guards.”

“Agreed, agreed, and agreed. And one more thing,” the Architect added. Danny waited. She could almost hear the sound of his skull caving in under the blow from the chair. She wanted to
do
it.

“You must have made a deal with the thing in the church, am I right? Otherwise you would have destroyed him. Whatever it was, that deal is now null and void. Are we clear?”

T
en minutes later, Danny was on her way back to the school-hospital. It had begun to snow. Nancy and Cad Broker flanked her in the backseat, with the guards up front. Danny found herself shrinking away from Cad, something she hadn’t done with Kelley. But the idea of a half-man, half-zero was somehow even more repulsive to Danny than an animated corpse. Like it might be contagious to the touch. And she knew nothing about the man, except he was probably insane, to willingly relinquish his life like that. He could still bite.

It was still relatively early in the day, the streets not as busy as usual, people staying in because of the precipitation. There wasn’t a rush hour here. People didn’t have jobs in the old-fashioned sense. Let it snow. Danny noticed there was a pair of hooded acolytes standing on the church steps, watching them leave; she wondered how differently the fight would have gone if she’d known the thing she was fighting was only half-human. It explained the foul stench of the acolyte’s blood. Somehow it was changing, and whatever death was occurring there, it made his blood stink like puke.
Her mind returned to Cad sitting beside her, a sour sack of vomit blood, half-dead, half-living, and she felt her own gorge rising.

•   •   •

Back at the hospital, Danny found herself left unguarded.

Nancy had let her keep the clothes she’d been given. Apparently, Danny was no longer considered a security risk. It made sense—she’d been authorized to kill. Let her have the room to operate. She felt sick in her guts and spent a long time with her head hanging over a toilet in the girls’ room. When she didn’t throw up after twenty minutes, she returned to her bed, weary and ill, her thoughts worn out.

Right now she didn’t have a plan. She’d need one very soon, however. But there was a lot to process: “There are more of us than you think, and we’re everywhere,” the Architect had said, as Danny was leaving his smoke-stale office. She, of all people, was having long conversations with living corpses who ate human flesh to maintain themselves. It was wolves talking to an unusually violent sheep. But she was still on the menu, and they’d eventually kill her, if not eat her. There was no way these things would risk having a proven zero-killer like Danny around.

So she knew there were two plans to make: The first was how to destroy one or both of the monsters running Happy Town. The second was to escape the place before they destroyed her right back, with as many kids in tow as possible.

The comatose teenager watched eternity go by in the gloom of the classroom. Danny watched the presidents. None of them had known what would happen, or that there would one day be a
last
president. She eventually slept a little, drifting in and out, waking with a start every time her dreams stuffed the doorway with rotten undead. At some point in the early afternoon the snow stopped falling.

T
he bed wasn’t particularly comfortable by ordinary standards, but to a body accustomed to sleeping in the front seats of cars, the simple fact of being fully prone in a warm room was luxury beyond compare. When
Danny awoke, it was because lunch had arrived; another male nurse was backing a cart into the room. He turned around, and she cried out:

“Patrick!”

He put a finger to his lips, tipping his eyes at the door by way of caution, and rolled the food to her bedside. “Let’s get you upright,” he said, operating the bed motors to get her into the full sitting position. “Today we have shepherd’s pie, creamy whole milk from an actual cow that Amy just gave a checkup to, coffee, bread, and jam. Fuck a duck, you’re skinny. You’ve completely let yourself go.”

“What are you doing here?” Danny asked, stupid with surprise. Her mind was whirling. She thought she had no allies in the Tribe, and yet here was Patrick, chattering along like a jaybird just as cheerful as could be.

“I’m Amy’s official nurse. They let me work here while they figure out the Tribe. It’s the largest group they’ve had in quite a while; most are still outside the wall in this kind of shantytown. Anybody with useful skills the town keeps, that’s how it really works. If they like me, they’ll say I brought in child X; meanwhile if they don’t like child X’s father, they’ll throw him out. The system here is completely corrupt.”

“I figured that much. God, It’s good to see you, Patrick.”

“Me, too,” he said. “To see you, I mean. Not me, I can see myself any time. Don’t judge me for coming here. I wasn’t going to participate except for two things: First, things totally imploded as soon as you left and I’m pretty sure I’d have got killed sometime soon . . . and second, if you turned up anywhere, I figured you would turn up here. Where’s Wulf?”

“Died in his sleep,” Danny said.

“I’m sorry. Amy thought that was going to happen pretty soon. She said the way his nose was turning blue meant his heart was congested.”

“Amy,” Danny muttered, and her eyes went to the window.

“We don’t hate you, Danny,” Patrick said, his voice low and soft, the way people spoke at funerals back when there were such things. “Some people do, but they’re assholes. What hurts is
you
hating
us
.”

“But I don’t—” Danny began.

“Even after what happened?”

“You didn’t start that.”

“Oh, eat your food,” Patrick said. “I can’t deal with it when you’re being reasonable. I’m going to check on your roommate. We can talk once you’re sedated by carbohydrates.”

As it happened, they didn’t resume their conversation until noon. Patrick
came in with a cart laden with sheets, towels, hospital gowns, and washing materials; he started by changing Danny’s bed linens, and chatted with her in low tones. Danny stood by the window and mostly listened. Patrick told her that the administrators of Happy Town (which was the worst name imaginable—
underpromise and overdeliver
, he often used to say on his television show; “Happy Town” just screamed hubris) were taking a special interest in the Tribe. And their interest seemed to focus especially on the banty sheriff who led them. He didn’t know why.

“There are bureaucrats here, can you believe it? The end of the world happened and we still have bureaucrats. They test everybody before you’re allowed into town. And we are not in Kansas anymore, by the way. They asked me if I was gay, what my political orientation was, and whether I believed the zombie outbreak was caused by Islamic militants. They wanted to know if I was religious! Like, ‘Hey, are you interested in religion? Separation of church and state? Would you consider converting to a new religion if asked about it?’ ”

“They Scientologists?” Danny interrupted. She knew the answer, but she wanted to hear more about this question. Patrick was sponge-bathing the comatose youth in the other bed.

“They’re looking for converts, I guess. A lot of people feel like their faith doesn’t work anymore, these days. You know. They think it’s End Times because Walmart is out of business. But—I guess you don’t know this yet—there’s a religion here in town, and it’s pretty twisted. There’s a church downtown where they have this crucified zero standing in for Jesus. I think the bureaucrats are worried about it.”

“Huh,” Danny grunted.

“Then they asked a ton of questions about the Tribe. We’re better known than I thought. They know a lot of inside stuff. Who the players are, first of all. A lot of questions about you. I tried not to sound like I knew you personally, right? Because I didn’t want to give them any details. Especially about . . . somebody you used to know really well. They were very interested in these rumors that we traveled with a thinker, and I played dumb about it.”

“Good idea,” Danny said. She could see Patrick was extremely cautious around that subject; it showed her how much of a wall she had erected between herself and the others to keep Kelley safe. She wondered why he was speaking in a near-whisper. The hall guard had been pulled off her room, but they might have had listening devices in place, she supposed.

“Anyhoodles,” he went on, flipping the patient on his side, “they wanted to know how many members were permanent to the Tribe, how many vehicles, how much fuel we used per day for how many miles of travel. What hours did we travel per day? And did we know any good places to get medical supplies, food, and weapons? I didn’t know anything detailed about all that stuff, but they tried anyway. I wanted to seem real reasonable because I think it was a strike against me that I admitted I was queer.”

“So basically they’re stuck here and they need eyes and ears out on the road. That’s what I’m getting out of this,” Danny said. She wondered how the bureaucrats came to know as much as they did, but Patrick wouldn’t have been their first interview. They probably talked to that bastard Crawford first. He’d have told them everything he could think of, and more.

“But here’s the part I thought you ought to know about,” Patrick said, finishing up the sponge bath. He lowered his voice so Danny could hardly hear him. “They asked me about you in some detail. ‘The leader of your organization recently departed. Do you know where she went? . . . Is she on good terms with others in the organization? . . . How is she equipped? . . . Does she have traveling companions? . . . Have you communicated with her recently?’ The woman asking the questions didn’t say
why
she was asking these things, but the
shape
of the questions was telling. You know what it felt like?” he concluded. “It felt like they were thinking of hiring you for a job, and I was one of the references on your résumé.”

Patrick turned his attention to Danny, making a noisy show of getting her washed up. He showed her the sponge at one point during the cleanup: It was red with reconstituted blood.

“Don’t ask,” Danny said. He didn’t, but kept on talking, wringing the sponge out and pouring the bloody water out the window.

“Somebody killed a guy at the church last night,” he remarked.

“That’s too bad,” Danny said. She waited, but Patrick seemed to have taken the hint.

“You missed an awful scene back on the road,” he continued. “I mean not just the—the thing that happened. But after that, after you went. There were all these arguments. Guns got pointed at people. The chooks went crazy. I thought for sure somebody else was going to die. A bunch of people drove off to find this train station of yours. I went with them because me and Maria were watching all these kids and most of the parents wanted to go that way. We got to this little depot place and there were guards and another
big argument broke out. People started throwing punches. Some wanted to go and some wanted to wait and see.

“Then we heard the train whistle, and that was that. A day later we were all in the processing center behind the train station, waiting to be admitted into Happy Town. And now, here you are. One big happy family again,” Patrick concluded. “Of people who mostly refuse to speak to each other.”

•   •   •

He came for his late-afternoon round and arrived just as Danny was getting out of bed.

“I have to take a dump,” she said. “I’m not doing that in a bedpan.”

“Try to look ill,” Patrick said, and when she didn’t: “Perfect.”

She allowed Patrick to escort her into the hallway, past a couple of people dressed like surgeons who were struggling to interpret an X-ray print, and down to the girls’ room. Those two might have been yoga instructors or massage therapists, Danny thought. There were so few doctors left in the world—or cops, for that matter. The very first people to be attacked and eaten had all been first responders.