Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  She didn’t think it was Kelley she’d seen; maybe a hunter. But any hunter would have fled at Kelley’s scent. So if it was one of the wolf-smart zeroes, that meant Kelley was nowhere nearby.

  Then Danny saw the pale ripple of the muumuu coming out of the warehouse itself. Kelley had been in there. Who—or what—had been nearby?

  She tabled that aspect of the problem; her sister had reached the interceptor and was looking around. Or, to be precise, scenting the air. It disturbed Danny to think the thing that had been her sibling now operated more by smell than sight.

  “Kelley!” Danny whispered, as loudly as she dared. The thin neck swiveled around. Danny saw Kelley’s bandages were smeared with blood. She would have to change them before they returned to the Tribe. Kelley walked toward the interceptor and looked inside, then again scented the air with her nose tipped up. Danny emerged from the security booth, but kept most of her mass behind it, opposite where she’d seen the unknown figure move out of sight.

  “Over here,” she said. Kelley came swaying toward her, and Danny felt the same thrill of horror she experienced every time: All her instincts cried out that the enemy was coming. That she needed to destroy this thing.

  “Whenever I come near, you hold your breath,” Kelley said, when she was close to Danny.

  “Because you stink,” Danny lied. “There was another zero. I saw it.”

  “Yes,” Kelley said. She never bothered to lie anymore. That was a thing the living did. If she didn’t want to admit something, she simply remained silent.

  “A thinker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you talk to it?”

  Kelley chose silence.

  “Goddamn it, Kelley, I need to know.”

  No response.

  Danny found her hand on the butt of her sidearm. Kelley’s silences had become deeper, lately. It was hard to explain. Somehow she seemed to be retreating inside herself. Without her personality to hang on to, Kelley was just another sentient corpse; the thing Danny feared the most was an ambush by her own sister, if that glimmer of her old self ever went away completely. The factor that kept Kelley in touch with her past humanity might be Danny’s determination to keep her that way. If Danny broke that compact, there would be consequences.

  Danny let her hand fall into her pocket and retrieved the keys to the interceptor.

  “The subject is not closed. But we need to get out of here. There’s a shitload of motorcycles coming.”

  Danny drove back by a more direct route than the one they’d taken out. Kelley had removed the bandages that bound up her head—once there was blood on them, she was in danger of getting moldy underneath. Danny would rewrap her before they came into view of the Tribe’s encampment.

  She glanced over at her sister after a period of prolonged silence—the kind of silence that made Danny feel alone. The features of Kelley’s face were recognizable, but discolored, sagging. The skin had tightened across the high bones—brow and cheeks—and lost its shape around mouth and neck. Kelley looked almost as if she had aged fifty years. Or, if Danny was honest, as if she’d died and begun to rot.

  “So who was it?”

  “One of my kind,” Kelley replied. “But they’re boring. They don’t have any feelings.”

  “You understand that I consider that consorting with the enemy, right? Did you talk about the Tribe? Our defenses? Our route?”

  “He wanted me to join his group. They’ve been hunting along the roads to the north.”

  “Did you talk about the Tribe?”

  “No, Danny. We didn’t. He already knew.”

  Kelley took a long breath that would have signified emphasis for a living person. But she was merely out of air for speaking. Danny found herself gnawing at the knotted skin over her fingerless knuckles. The instant she realized she was doing it, she took her hand away from her face—no good setting an example that way. He already knew? What the hell did that mean? How did he know? She wanted to ask but knew Kelley wouldn’t respond to such questions. She didn’t when she was alive.

  “Okay,” Danny began, speaking carefully, “he already knew about the Tribe. Probably rumors and stuff. So he just wanted you to join his group and kill the living for food.”

  “He also wanted to know how many kids we had,” Kelley said. “Like, if we had too many.”

  “How many is ‘too many’ children?”

  “I don’t know. I said no.”

  “Okay,” Danny said, as if she understood. “What else?”

  “What else did we talk about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “None of your business.”

  • • •

  When Danny returned to the Tribe, Kelley’s bandages refreshed, she moved into action without delay. She reported on the motorcycle gang and ordered everyone to saddle up immediately.

  The Reapers, if that’s who they were, hadn’t followed her, as far as Danny could tell; at least, she hadn’t heard any engine sounds when she stopped on the road to wrap up Kelley.

  There were no surprises as far as the truck stop the scouts had found, but twenty kilometers after that, the landscape was writhing with the undead. Beyond the infested area, it was supposed to be completely zero-free for a day’s drive or more. That was good enough for the Tribe. They weren’t going to a specific destination. It didn’t work that way. But the project of going eastward, the logistics of it, kept everybody occupied and gave them a common purpose. So rather than give up, they all focused on the problem of finding a route around the swarm—as if it was part of a long-term plan, and not merely another meaningless obstacle.

  And for many, it did fit in with a plan of sorts. The rumors of a safe place came from that direction like the smell of a summer day comes off the horizon before the sun has even risen. It was something to hope for, a direction to go. Eastward, somewhere. They’d heard about this possible Shan-gri-la from hitchhikers and fellow-roamers. How far east, though, nobody could say.

  Danny was out front in the interceptor with Kelley at her side as always; then came the scouts on their motorcycles, half a dozen of them. They rode herd, sometimes falling back, sometimes stringing out ahead, keeping an eye on the shadows. The main file of vehicles traveled in no particular order, except that the motor home was always in the middle, and the ambulance always at the back; the convoy was mostly heavy-duty pickups, SUVs, and panel vans. What people wanted was a heavy vehicle with a durable suspension and enough room to lie down inside. There was also a roach coach, which served meals for the entire Tribe, if there was food enough, and a lineman’s repair truck with elevating basket that made an excellent sentry platform. One of the vans contained enough tools to perform almost any vehicle repair. Spare parts could be found wherever there was an abandoned car.

  They had a dedicated vehicle for tagalong strangers to the Tribe, as well: the Courtesy Bus, a parking shuttle painted with black-and-yellow zebra stripes to make it easy to find at the airport. The driver sat inside an improvised angle iron and chicken wire booth, and the big windows made it easy to see what the passengers were up to from outside. Mike Patterson was handcuffed to one of the grab bars in the back of the shuttle, which very much interested the other outsiders aboard that night. The Tribe’s policy was to pick up hitchhikers regardless of their appearance, as long as there were fewer than six in any one group. But they had to ride in the shuttle. The driver, Sue Baxter of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was prepared to drive the shuttle into a telephone pole if her charges tried to commandeer the vehicle. They’d never had any trouble like that, but after all that had happened so far, there was a tendency to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

  They drove through the night, reaching the truck stop as the moon was emerging cold and hard above the distant hills.

  • • •

  It was one of those vast plazas of asphalt and concrete designed to get hundreds of vehicles and their passengers refueled and back on the road all at once, day and night. There must have been fifty gas pumps
under a gigantic gullwing roof mounted on posts. At the center of the plaza was a sprawling collection of ransacked fast food restaurants and souvenir shops. They were surrounded by abandoned vehicles, mostly big rigs. There wasn’t much left to forage for. But the Tribe wasn’t looking for materiel, except fuel. Someday soon, all the gasoline would go bad—phase separation, contamination, and especially water getting into the ethanol-laced stuff. Gas had been around five bucks a gallon when the end came. Now it was priceless—and free of charge, if you had a siphon pump and a lookout watching for zeroes.

  Besides gasoline, if there was any, what they needed most was a good place to wait a couple of days while the scouts went the long way around to find a route to the east. These big truck stop plazas were excellent for holing up as they were generally fenced on three sides and the acres of pavement around them meant zeroes couldn’t attack from places of concealment. Nice field of fire, head-to-toe beaten zone, and three-way enfilade potential, as Danny had once described them. In better times it would have been lit up like the sun at night; now it was dark and full of black shadows that glittered with broken glass.

  As the first vehicles in the convoy arrived, a flare went up from the foremost; men and women spilled out of the others with flashlights, dogs, and guns, reconnoitering every corner of the place beneath the wobbling red light of the flare. They looked inside the looted truck trailers, checked all the cars, team-cleared the restaurants and shops, and kicked all two hundred of the restroom stall doors open. They searched the overgrown landscaping and made a circuit of the fence. All clear. No living, and no undead. Danny had taught them the system, and it kept them alive, so they stuck to it.

  A heap of mangled hunter corpses piled up among some abandoned big rigs suggested the place had been defended in the recent past—so maybe the local superpredators had been wiped out. The Tribe’s dogs, mostly Shepherds, barked furiously at the remains. They had to be pulled off. It was Tribe custom to burn the corpses of the dead and undead alike, but most other groups weren’t that organized—or didn’t care. They would burn these ones in the morning. As an extra precaution, there were double watches posted on all sides of the perimeter.

  Danny sent a team of lookouts five kilometers back down the interstate; they took the truck with the bucket lift. They’d spend the night in shifts at the top of the crane arm, watching in case the Vandal Reaper gang approached. The bucket was retrofitted with a .50 caliber machine gun, but they weren’t expected to fight. In practice, the heavy weapon made the crane oscillate so violently it was useless, anyway.

  Then she walked through the tall grass beyond the fence with Kelley, making a long, slow circuit of the plaza. Set the smell of a thinker out there like a moat. They’d do it again in the wee hours to make sure no expeditious corpses got too close.

  In half an hour, the plaza was occupied, secured, and the Tribe was moved in. It was their equivalent of 1700 hours: quitting time, but not yet bedtime. In fact, it was 1:20 in the morning.

  • • •

  “Can we have a quick talk?” Danny muttered to Patrick on her way back from the circuit. He was headed toward the White Whale with food for some of the kids; there was a DVD presentation of several early Ren & Stimpy episodes on the TV in there, to keep the little ones out from underfoot a while.

  “Ten minutes,” he said.

  Danny was at loose ends. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to do, despite all that needed to be done. This was one of those moments. She watched the Tribe assemble its fires and begin meal preparations. There was young Michele, and beside her as always her brother Jimmy James, who was shooting up tall all of a sudden; they attached themselves in a general way to Maria, the radio operator, who had lost her husband in Forest Peak.

  Danny remembered Michele as a blue-haired girl in deep shock when they’d first met. Now she came off as a grown woman, although she probably wasn’t sixteen yet. Danny didn’t remember her true age. A similar evolution had happened with Kelley, although Danny hadn’t been around for that part of her life. She turned and squinted out into the darkness beyond the pavement where Kelly stood beside the interceptor, motionless except for the rippling of the muumuu in the light breeze. Kelley’s head was tilted back; she was smelling the air.

  Then Patrick was back, cleaning between his fingers with a dish towel.

  “What’s up?”

  “You and that guy Beowulf . . .” she began, but realized she didn’t know what the question was.

  “So you want to talk about my old boyfriends.”

  “I got something on my mind,” Danny said. “I can’t—”

  “Are you feeling inarticulate?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it about? I mean name names, and we can put it together.”

  “Kelley.”

  “Inevitably,” Patrick said, as if he’d seen this one coming a long time.

  “It’s not like you think,” Danny hurried to add, although she didn’t know what he thought. “It’s just—well. I took her out for a feed tonight. She . . . I need you to keep this a secret.”

  “I have never betrayed a confidence,” Patrick said, stiffening his back. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have scored as much as I did in my twenties.”

  “I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking life and death maybe. See, I saw her with somebody. You know we go off on feeding trips. I’m not there the whole time. I leave her alone. Tonight I ran across that biker gang and came back early to pick her up . . . And I saw somebody. Something.”

  “A person?”

  “A thinker. Another thinker. They . . . they talked.”

  Danny felt as if she’d jumped off a cliff. Patrick had every right to run up and down through the plaza shouting this news, if he wanted to. But he wouldn’t. Only Patrick. Even Amy might blab. This man had the instinct for discretion.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Patrick said. “I mean, holy fucking leaping shit.” His hands went to his mouth, covered it like an injury.

  “That’s what I said. You can’t tell anybody. Not yet. Maybe never. I have to find out what it means first.”

  “What it means is they’re hanging out,” Patrick said. “It means—I don’t know what it means. Were they like passing a joint back and forth or anything? Dancing? I mean what do thinkers do when they meet?”

  “I just saw it for a second. She doesn’t deny it. She doesn’t even seem to think it’s a big deal.”

  “Maybe it isn’t.”

  “Maybe. There’s stuff she didn’t tell me.”

  “As long as nothing happens, it’s all good. But Danny? Why did you tell me about this?”

  She looked around them, as if the whole Tribe was listening in. In fact, they could not have been more perfectly ignored. There was food and heat and bedding to think about. Nobody cared what the sheriff and her old buddy were whispering about in the shadows.

  “First off, because you talk plenty, but you don’t tell. And I needed to tell somebody.”

  “Yeah, but you mentioned Beowulf. Why?”

  “That’s the thing,” Danny said. She was struggling so much with words. Her mind wasn’t geared for this kind of abstract thinking. “I . . . I thought after you lost that guy Weaver in the early days, you’d never find anybody else. You were real busted up over it. But then you found Beowulf. And you guys were like really tight. I mean I guess in love, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then a few months ago, you kind of stopped talking to each other.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you really in love? Like, I want to spend the rest of my life with you?”

  “Believe it or not, Danny, even homosexuals can experience the full gamut of human emotions,” Patrick said, a little stung. “God, you’re so un-reformed in so many ways.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. You guys were supertight and then you broke up. And he left the Tribe.”

  “Yep,” Patrick said, tight-lipped. Danny realized his eyes were getting wet. It still hurt to
think about. That erased any doubts she had about the extent of his feelings. “What does my failed relationship have to do with Kelley?”

  Suddenly, Danny found the words.

  “I’m wondering if me and Kelley are meant to be together anymore. I did right by her. I did my best. I found her. Now the two of us sit together all day like one of those old married couples and there ain’t shit between us.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I’ll tell you what. You know how it felt when I saw that other one there? That other thinker? It felt like I caught her cheating.”

  “Danny,” Patrick said, and took her two-fingered hand in both of his. “Listen to me. Even after the end of the world, with humankind in ruins and zombies everywhere, people can still find love. I think that’s awesome. But if we didn’t fall out of love, too, we wouldn’t really be people anymore. I don’t know what Kelley’s up to, but you’re just doing the hard work of being a fucked-up human being.”

  • • •

  Mike Patterson sat on the Courtesy Bus and waited to find out what was going to happen to him. He’d been shackled to a pole since his capture, largely ignored except when people paused outside the shuttle to give him dirty looks. The three other survivors who had ridden with the convoy for several days had decided to take their chances on foot again, staying behind after a quick pit stop to replace a tire on one of the trucks. They had been unnerved by the hatred coming in through the shuttle windows, even if it wasn’t aimed exactly at them.

  So now Mike was alone.

  He’d been able to listen to the driver singing tolerably well in her chicken wire booth, but now that the convoy had stopped, she was somewhere else, probably eating. He felt like a goldfish in a tank: The interior fluorescent fixtures remained on, so he was flooded with baleful green light while the rest of the world was in darkness. He had to pee something wicked. He was hungry. And he stank. Everybody stank, of course, but the sheer terror of having that wild redheaded woman come after him, driving like a demon, charging him, and then him believing she was going to kill him on the spot—he’d gone into perspiration overdrive. His armpits smelled like an electrical fire in an onion factory.