Rise Again Below Zero (57 page)

Apparently, the Architect had changed his mind about her. She was fair game, after all.

Danny discovered she couldn’t work her fingers, couldn’t pull the pin on the grenade. She tried to do it with her teeth, but they chattered and skated over the steel ring and would not hold it. She could make fists, though. So she took up the knife in her good hand again and stabbed the tip through the ring on the pin of the grenade, and pulled it free that way. There was more to do, but she couldn’t think what it was.

The zeroes were close now, and she saw their faces. The nearest one was missing its nose and its skin was blue-black, probably from exposure to cold. It was a grim silhouette against the rapidly paling sky. Some part of Danny observed it wasn’t snowing anymore.

The grenade. Throw it over the side with the precious lead cylinder. Danny dumped the sock full of metal off the side of the dam into the reservoir,
as there was no question of throwing it in her condition. She heard the loud, flat
bang
of the explosion come very shortly after that—she had almost waited too long. The force of the blast felt like a slap in the face. Then a noisy shower of water sprayed up the side of the dam. The zeroes were so close they caught the spray full in the face; the reservoir was full, the waterline less than ten feet below the top of the dam.

The entire party of zeroes collapsed instantly, robbed of animation. They were steaming corpses now.

Suck it
, Danny tried to say, and didn’t care if her idea of a clever retort was unwitty.
Her
skin was burning now, as well. The blown-up lead cylinder contained a pellet of radioactive metal, of course. Danny had just given herself an extra-concentrated dose of poison.

The water felt hot; she didn’t know if it was real heat or some property of the radiation that only felt like heat, but she welcomed it. It broke through the numbness. She could bend what fingers she had.

The siren was screaming still, and now there were figures swarming down the road at both ends of the dam. She would soon be overrun or shot dead, regardless of the radiation. Especially if there were living men among them. She didn’t know if the zeroes would entrust mortals with something as vital as guarding the dam, but they might need someone to read the maintenance manuals for them.

Danny looked over the side at the water and saw a great column of steam coming up, the surface churning where the grenade had exploded. She had one more task and then she could lie back and enjoy the acid warmth of the radiation. There were auras glowing around everything, blue-green eels.

Danny crawled on hands and knees toward the electrical plant, dragging the backpack alongside her. She was within a few yards of the structure, close enough to see where the sheds dropped down into the water on the reservoir side and met two big humped shapes of dark, pitted iron, presumably the covers for the turbines below. She tried to get the pin free from a grenade, and it worked. She was so surprised she almost dropped the weapon, but managed to fumble it over the side, where it exploded at the waterline, punching a hole in the iron. Danny felt needles of ice lance her face. Water was gurgling into the hole she’d made, flowing into some hollow booming space. It might work.

She sat on her haunches and bowled another grenade; it bounced off the side of the structure and exploded in midair, doing little damage. So she
shuffled forward another few feet and was able to toss the next one down between the pair of turbines. It went off with a good, metallic
clang
and there was a deep, vibrating thump from somewhere inside the dam that sounded like major damage. The dam itself was vibrating now, some great mechanical assembly grinding itself to pieces inside. She chucked two more grenades down into the gap and the noises grew. Her arm was nice and limber now. She felt like she could pitch a Little League game.

But she hadn’t been paying attention to the zeroes.

They were close, dozens of them. They rushed at her, silently, faces bent into snarls; the first few reached the dark, wet slick where the first grenade had wetted the deck, and they collapsed among the others. The remaining zeroes skidded to a halt. One of them knelt to examine the wetness, and it also fell lifeless, face downward, and slipped over the side of the dam into the roiling water. The rest fell back a few paces, and one of them passed a rifle to the foremost.

They were all piss-poor shots, of course. Zeroes couldn’t read, appreciate music, or shoot accurately. But Danny had no illusions about gunfire. Even bullets aimed at nothing eventually hit something. And with the pain in her head and the frostbite and the burning skin she didn’t think her system could take another outrage. Not even if they just winged her.

She had two more grenades, so she rolled one of them along the parapet toward the zeroes. It exploded with a yellow flash and blew chunks out of them, twisting a section of the railing so that it hung over the side of the dam. Something hit Danny, as well. She didn’t know if it was a piece of concrete, a bullet, or simply the shock of the blast. But her vision went red on one side, and then her left eye stopped working. The world went flat, like a television picture.

Danny turned her attention to the turbines again, twisting her head to see. There was a hell of a lot of grinding and banging noise down there, and above it all the rush of a very large quantity of water. She crawled to the far side of the dam and looked down: A black gout of water was spewing out of the sluiceway, bursting over the narrow banks of the river, washing away the snow as it flooded out into the valley. But it wasn’t enough. She had to drain the whole bathtub, and do it fast.

The train was coming into view down the valley, bigger than Danny imagined it would be, a post of black smoke leaping up out of the exhaust stack and scouring against the cliff wall beside it. It was accelerating, just as she had thought. The Architect wasn’t going to stop here.

The zeroes hadn’t noticed this. They were picking their way across the blasted part of the parapet now. Danny had inadvertently removed the radioactive barrier when she detonated the grenade. They were more hideous than ever now, some missing arms or faces, all of them chewed up by the explosion, but none of them stopped. The one with the rifle was completely mobile, if pocked with craters. He would seek retribution for the wounds that did not heal, of course. Then two of the zeroes were flung to the ground—Danny saw black holes appear in their bodies. Was someone shooting at them? She began to crawl.

The fuel tanks for the backup generators were on the reservoir side of the building. Danny identified them, two thousand-gallon tanks of propane mounted on iron frames against the hull of the dam, near the high-water line so if there were a fire they would burn nothing but water and concrete. That meant they would also blow the living shit out of the dam, if they chanced to explode. Danny dragged herself toward them. Something punched her in the body, knocked her sideways. It didn’t hurt, but she was having trouble breathing.

In the growing light she saw that there was blood pouring out of her chest. That explained the breathing problem. She’d been shot. Even as she marveled at this, her left ankle flew up in the air of its own accord and she saw she’d been shot again. There was a ragged hole in her boot with a pale pink mass inside that turned red as she watched.

Danny got her back up against the nearest of the elephant-sized gas tanks.
Shoot this, assholes. Go ahead.
Time was running out. It seemed to her there ought to be something important, some revelation or insight that would put it all in perspective. But there wasn’t. She was half-blind and her head hurt and she was shot up and she didn’t want it anymore. Might as well wind up her affairs. There were other people running in her direction now. They looked familiar. Not zeroes. She must be hallucinating. No time left to wonder.

She rummaged in the backpack and found the one remaining object she would need, the thing she had been lugging since long before she got the deadly core of heavy metal. It had been with her since she knelt in the field beside the alcohol-soaked corpse of her sister. The thing she retrieved before she set fire to Kelley’s rags and watched the familiar, tragic body burst into yellow and blue flames. She could see the flames in her mind and feel the heat. Then she felt herself stepping off the cliff, falling into that terrible sorrow, falling so that her belly touched her backbone. But this
time it was different. She wasn’t falling, she was flying. Flying away from the cliff. The flames had become daybreak, and she could fly.

But there was something more to be done. Something back in the world.

Danny blinked and regained consciousness. The sun broke above the reservoir, the same barbaric golden eye that had looked indifferently down on the world since the dawn of mankind and the dawn of the solar system and the birth of God, for all she knew. The backpack was open between her knees. Soon she could fly all she wanted. Danny thrust her quaking hands into the bag and lifted out the precious burden. She stripped off the plastic bags that wrapped it tight and then pressed it to the bleeding crater in her chest, held it and rocked it and with the one remaining finger of her club hand she pulled the pin from her last grenade.

“I said forever,” she whispered to Kelley’s mummified head, and closed her eyes.

T
hey heard the detonation all the way back in Happy Town. Heads turned. Thousands of zeroes twisted around toward the noise. The living who continued to flee through the badlands paused at the mighty sound, but kept on moving. There wasn’t anything else; just the single explosion and then the new day was bright upon the valley, shining through a gap in the clouds, and it was time for the unliving to continue the slow progress toward immortality. They had forever, after all, the zeroes did. With fresh meat and enough padding to protect unhealing flesh, they could live, after their fashion, for eternity.

Then there was another sound, a deep roar, growing until it sounded like the ocean in a storm.

•   •   •

Aboard the train, the Architect, Cad Broker, and a few others in various stages of undeath were in the engineer’s compartment, watching the canyon walls move past, almost to the reservoir. They had no intention of stopping, although that’s what the thinkers there were expecting; this was no time to stop just because promises had been made. All of the living servants
they’d brought were back with the children, keeping order inside the boxcars. They would be eaten first. The sun rose above the horizon, and they saw tiny silhouetted figures running along the top of the dam ahead. Then there was a flash of light and a greasy orange ball of fire briefly outshone the sun.

The detonation was so loud it sounded like a blow to the train itself. The Architect turned on the engineer, the one living man allowed at the front of the train.

“Stop for nothing. Stop for nothing or I will eat your eyes.”

But massive chunks of stone were spilling down the sides of the canyon now, some crashing to the tracks, some pulverizing the roadway or hitting the reservoir, sending up gouts of water. The brakes of the engine shrieked and everyone was thrown forward; they could hear screams from the boxcars. Then the face of the dam seemed to liquefy, slumping into the river, and a white spray leaped through it, followed by a shimmering black mass. A wall of water, beating the rocks with a vibration like the hooves of a great herd. The river burst its banks and the tide swept past the train, no more than a dozen feet below the rails at its greatest height.

“You foolish bitch,” he said to himself. “We don’t drown.”

The words had barely left his broken lips when the radiation exerted its influence and he fell lifeless to the floor of the engine compartment. The Architect’s brief eternity was over.

The partially unliving around him cried out, for they could still feel pain, and the radioactive water was fighting with the infection for the privilege of taking their lives. They screamed and clawed at their own flesh, and then collapsed like the others. Then the flood surge was past, the river three times its natural height but well below the tracks. It roared away down the canyon, sweeping over the banks of the river and battering the cliffs.

•   •   •

It took twelve minutes for the flood to reach the outlet in the canyon near where Happy Town had been built. Then the surge rose over the high-class neighborhood against the hill, spilling down the streets and sluicing through backyards, turning the white snow black. Thousands of zeroes turned to face the wall of foaming destruction that sped toward them, uncomprehending. Then Happy Town was underwater, crushed by the deluge and the trees and rocks and debris caught up in the tide. The ruined church steeple was the last thing visible above the foam. Then it twisted, bent, and drowned.