Rise Again Below Zero (9 page)

“This is a fight for the living,” Danny said. “If you catch a bullet or something, you won’t heal. We’ll be back in an hour or so. Just wait. Listen to the radio and honk the horn if anything changes back at the camp.”

Kelley didn’t respond. She’d told them what she knew. She was done.

Danny retrieved a cold-weather jacket from the trunk—it was midnight blue, and would hide her better in the dark than the tan windbreaker she was wearing. Besides, Topper was right: Winter had arrived.

They moved a little way off the shoulder so they weren’t in a clear field of fire down the road, then hiked along parallel to it. There was a lot of tripping and cursing in the blackness, and twice they came up against wire fences that were invisible until they hit them.

They both carried shotguns and combat knives; Danny also had her sidearm and a hand grenade tucked away in her utility belt. The scouts had found caches of combat-grade hardware at abandoned military bases and at police stations, and there was a general rule that grenades, rocket launchers, and the like were not possessed by anyone except a few security personnel in the Tribe. It kept accidents and arguments from getting out of hand. In the trunk of the interceptor, Danny kept a black nylon backpack containing enough ordnance to sink a destroyer.

She and Topper stole through the night, getting quieter and more careful as they began to see more man-signs: trash caught in the fences, junked vehicles, wheel ruts going off to various unseen destinations.

Now they were crouching, breathing carefully, hands on their weapons.

Anybody who dared to keep a homestead these days put out security perimeters, the more the better. Mostly it was wires with bells attached to them, moats of broken glass and accordion wire, and walls made of assorted junk, but they might even find generator-powered electric fences, motion detectors, and infrared cameras. This one was different. They could see lights up ahead before they came to the first perimeter defense, and it wasn’t much of an obstacle.

It was an old sheep fence with barbed wire coiled along the top on the inside. The idiots had made it easy to get in—the wire should have been on the outside of the fence. Danny tapped Topper’s arm: stop. The handful of closely placed lights burning at the bottom of the next hill meant a building with windows. They were still a kilometer distant, but in that heavy darkness the lights stood out like beacons.

“You go around that way, toward the back. I’ll come down the road. If I draw any fire, you rush in behind and get the fuckers while they’re facing the other way.”

Topper made a noise of disapproval.

“What?” Danny said.

“I still think it’s a setup. That driver was trying to lure you down this goddamn road, and you know it. Now they got all the lights on and the windows ain’t even boarded up, and you think you’re just going to draw some blind fire? Hell no. This here is a big old fucking piece of mouse cheese.”

“If they see me coming, they won’t look for you, that’s the whole point.”

“I’m just trying to say be careful, Sheriff. Don’t go and get yourself killed.”

“I hadn’t really planned on it.”

T
wo minutes later, Danny had reached the dirt road again. Her boots crunched on the loose grit like it was breakfast cereal. She drew a steadying breath and began her march toward the house.

She was within rifle shot now, if it had been daylight. But they wouldn’t be able to get a bead on her for a while yet in the dark—even a good night
scope would have trouble picking her out at this distance. She kept on walking, her steps amplified in the cool, clear air. She passed through a broken-down gate, a continuation of the sheep fence they’d come up against. It wasn’t even locked; there was a gap she could step through.

And as she did so, the floodlights came on.

Danny tossed herself back through the gate and crouched low against one of the crooked posts. Her eyes throbbed with the sudden brightness. There were lights mounted on the roof of the main building, about a fifty-second sprint from her location. They revealed a ranch yard: barns, sheds, a main house, vacant animal pens. Fences running every which way inside a taller fence that marked the borders of the ranch compound itself. No gunshots rang through the night, no shrilling alarms or shouting. Just the lights, staring across the dry grass like sunlight on the moon, colorless and severe with long inky shadows.

They must be automatic,
Danny thought. If the occupants were truly looking, they couldn’t have failed to see her. But they weren’t doing anything about it.
Maybe waiting for a better shot
. Still, Danny’s role here was to draw fire.

She hitched up her gun belt, took a few deep drags of air, and then sprinted through the gap in the gate, running zigzag for the nearest cover—a pickup truck on blocks near a cattle pen.

She got behind the truck without incident.

Now she stole along the margin of the pen, then broke cover and ran for a long, low shed. She got her back up against that and dipped around the corner.

No sign of life from the main house.

She drew her Beretta out of its holster and thumbed the safety up. She would use the pistol for cover fire to make her enemies duck, save the shotgun for when she got to the building and needed to clear a room.

She swiftly reached the house. Still nothing.

Okay, now things are getting weird
.

It appeared nobody was home. Where was the Chevelle? She could still smell dust in the air; it
had
come this way. But it was not in the yard as far as she could see, and none of the outbuildings would provide sufficient cover. She decided to join Topper around the back, in case it was there.

She kept below the windows and skirted the house; at the rear corner, she risked a hissed signal and waved to Topper, who was hiding behind a stack of rusting natural gas cylinders. Always a good place to seek cover—people
were afraid to shoot at fuel tanks, as a rule, and they were made of heavy steel. No sign of the Chevelle, but there was an open gate at the back of the property and the long straight road continued into the darkness behind it.

They met in the middle of the back wall of the house and took up positions on either side of the back door, which led into a mudroom with the kitchen beyond.

“You see anybody inside?” Danny whispered.

“No, nobody,” said Topper.

“Huh.”

“Yeah, I know. Weird.”

The lights in the house were blazing, the only sound was the hum of a generator running in one of the barns. They both raised their weapons. Danny pumped her fist three times, because she didn’t have enough fingers on that hand to count to three, and then they stormed through the screen door, Danny first.

The only thing that came at them was the stench of rotten meat.

The original occupants of the ranch were long gone. Human beings hadn’t taken their place.

It could only be zeroes that had squatted there recently—thinkers. Hunters wouldn’t know to fire up the generator.

The air was dripping with a miasma of decay, heavy clouds of flies motoring through it. The mudroom was undisturbed. There were rubber boots, jackets, rakes in there. The kitchen was mostly untouched as well, mundane clutter under the bright fluorescent lights, dirty dishes, a coffee cup with a black crust in the bottom. Zeroes don’t cook. Bloody footprints all over the floor, however, told of worse to come.

Sure enough, the next room—the dining room, it must once have been—was a scene from hell.

The fly-studded chandelier cast yellow light on a four-walled cesspool. There was a gelatinous coat of rotten blood halfway up the walls, the ceiling spattered with it, the floor toe-deep in the stuff. It was so rancid it bubbled in places, seething with maggots. They could hear it fizzing. No furniture in there, but in the middle of the room, a four-foot-high pile of animal remains. Human and sheep, maybe. Impossible to tell. Topper suddenly puked at the threshold of the dining room, his vomit diluting the stew of gore. Retching, he followed Danny around the perimeter of the room, boots sucking through the effluent, both of them covering their noses and
mouths with their sleeves. Neither of them spoke. In the center hall, Topper went left and Danny went right.

She made it all the way to the front parlor before her own belly gave up, because that’s where they’d hung the children.

Topper was somewhere in the back and Danny was alone in the parlor when she saw them. The cadavers were roped up on hooks in the ceiling. They had been eaten where they hung, nothing left of them but blackening red pulp in the shape of marionettes. Even then, Danny might have been able to keep her gorge down. But as she passed the swaying remains, one of them lifted its head.

It couldn’t speak without lips, but Danny didn’t need to discuss the options. The child tried to say something, its eyes staring from crimson, lidless sockets. How life remained in that skinless husk, Danny could not imagine.

“Mercy shot!” she shouted, breaking the silence.

She put a bullet through its brain, ran back out to the front of the house, and heaved her guts out.

If she hadn’t gone outside, she wouldn’t have seen the flare.

B
y the flickering light of the flare, Danny and Topper ran down the dirt road—the direct route back to the interceptor. But the interceptor was on its way to them. It never occurred to Danny that Kelley could still drive. But there she was, piloting the police car down that rutted strip with skill and considerable speed.

“Get over!” Danny barked as the vehicle braked to a halt beside her. A thick cloud of dust washed past them. Kelley slid across the bench seat and Danny took the wheel. Topper threw himself into the back, his heels up on the hard plastic seat. A chassis-banging power turn took them across the rough grass and then they were racing at high speed for the main road and the way back to the truck stop. Danny switched on the siren and the roof lights. They were going in hot.

“That fucking Chevelle is long gone,” Danny barked. “What the hell happened?”
There was a lot of confused gabble half-buried in static on the radio. Nobody was answering her calls. They were still several kilometers from the truck stop.

“I heard gunshots on the radio, and then screaming,” Kelley said. “It sounded like the kind of thing you’d want a flare for. So I launched a flare.”

“So nobody told you what it is? Do we know what’s happening?”

“From the noises I heard, the convoy is under attack. But the signal is really bad.” At the end of this speech, Kelley ran out of breath, and the final words were forced out of empty lungs in a rush. She didn’t take another breath to replace it.

Topper was separated from the front of the vehicle by a thick acrylic partition; he’d never been so close to the Leper, partition or no—he kept her at a safe distance, about the extent of a machete swing. Danny glanced in the rearview mirror and caught his expression.

“She doesn’t bite,” she remarked, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“I’m still shitting myself about all that blood in the house,” Topper said, changing the subject.

“You didn’t see the worst of it,” Danny said. She didn’t expand on the subject. He’d heard the mercy shot. There had been a dying survivor; no point getting into the details. She had the outlines of a plan and preferred to focus on that.

“You saw that road out back of the ranch there. You figure the Chevelle went out that way?”

“Must of,” Topper said. “I smelled exhaust when I got there, diesel and transmission smoke. Not just the Chevelle. I think there’s a truck, too. They knew that shit in the house would slow us right the fuck down.”

“We’ll have to deal with them later. When we get back to the Tribe, we’re entering a dynamic situation. We may have surprise on our side. If the road is clear, I’m going to drive by once so we can see what’s going on, then we’ll come in wherever it’s hottest, okay? I’ll pop the doors from up here. Come out shooting if that’s how it is. There’s the lights.”

•   •   •

It was standard procedure to flood the Tribe’s encampment with light if a zero attack occurred; there were spotlights on roof mounts for the purpose. Otherwise it was campfires only, to avoid attracting attention. Fires were a common sight at night—electric light, exceedingly rare.