Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  Her course took her alongside the White Whale. She could only defend one flank of it, but she was on the side with the most doors. The gang wouldn’t know the children were inside, but it still made a great target. If they figured out what the payload was, the fight was going to get extremely hot.

  The vehicles were no longer moving. It was time to take the fight on foot.

  The arsenal bag was locked in the trunk. Danny didn’t think she could get to it without taking a bullet—the interceptor was drawing a lot of attention. The roof lights were coming to pieces as gunfire shattered the plastic.

  “Get down!” she said to Kelley. When Kelley didn’t move, Danny grabbed the bandages around her head and pulled her sister down. Then she kicked her door open. Pump shotgun and her sidearm and a knife if it got intimate. Time to go.

  She dropped to the pavement and fired a load of shot underneath the interceptor, kicking the wheel out from under a bike on its way past. Then she came up on one knee and methodically fired into the densest part of the attack from behind her door. Fragments of window glass were raining down on her—not from the interceptor, but from the White Whale.

  She saw Charity the scout race straight at a couple of the enemy bikes on her own hog, blasting away with a long-barreled .357; they collided, and once the bodies stopped rolling it was hand-to-hand. Conn ditched his own machine beside her and waded in, a Russian automatic in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Time to move, Danny thought. Time to get bloody.

  Danny sprang into the open and a fresh round of gunfire heated the air around her, but the guns were rapidly turning useless because there were chooks, scouts, and bikers all over the place. It was a pitched battle, and the Tribe had a numbers advantage if every cowardly bastard among them manned up. Danny emptied the last shotgun shell into the crotch of a huge biker with an iron cross tattooed on his forehead, clubbed another over the head until the stock broke, and then she was beside Conn and Charity, still swinging hard.

  Then a crowd of huge, wild-eyed men charged into them like football linebackers; Danny got sacked and hit the ground and was winded so badly she could only suck air, but the man who hit her had rolled off, so she forced her legs back under herself. She drew and shot him before he could bring the pickaxe in his hands to bear. He grabbed at his throat and vomited blood.

  She didn’t know where anybody else was. Conn, the White Whale, they were gone, replaced by shaggy monster-men draped in rotten skins. She was disoriented, in that dangerous place when confusion kills. Then she saw the interceptor through the fray. The passenger door stood open. Kelley was not inside.

  Danny needed to get her back against something, so she made for the vehicle again. A tall, long-armed man with a chromed steel Nazi helmet collided with Danny, slamming her into the rear quarter of the interceptor. The wind barked out of her lungs, and she saw stars. One more hit like that and she was done.

  She heard but did not see the man’s boots scraping as he stepped back from her, and she sensed there was a blow coming in, even before her vision cleared. She threw herself toward the driver’s side door, hoping it would deflect something; an instant later the whack of chain on the roof told her she’d saved her own ass for the millionth time. But the next blow whipped around her stump-hand and stung like fire. He was swinging a greasy drive chain at Danny, his lean face contorted with the desire to see her bleed.

  Danny reached into the vehicle. There was a sawn-down shotgun concealed under the dash if she could get it. But hard fingers grabbed her hair and yanked her head back into the A pillar. There was a second biker, hauling her into the wedge of space between the door frame and the car. She was fully exposed for the next blow of the chain, her throat arched. She kicked, but the tall biker had gotten in close, his knee shoved into Danny’s crotch so she couldn’t twist away. Her eyes found the second biker, a big Samoan-looking dude with a greasy pyramid of hair pouring down his neck. She saw him upside down. Clawed for his face but couldn’t reach. She felt her hair tearing out of her scalp.

  Then the Samoan screamed, and there was a spidery shape wrapped around his throat—Kelley’s arm. She was behind him, the bandages around her face unraveling as she opened her jaws and jammed her teeth deep into his flesh. He tried to pull her off and his hand met a fountain of blood. Danny’s head fell free of his other fist. She dropped low and got one boot up and pushed the tall man away, taking the chain across her leg. His attention was off her completely; the screams of the second man were hideous to hear. Danny tore the concealed weapon out of its duct-tape moorings and fired it straight up at the man with the chain. The chromed helmet opened up like a flower and tumbled away with his head inside it.

  Danny dragged herself back up, mastering the searing pain where she’d been slashed by the chain. If she could still move, she wasn’t entitled to suffer yet. She saw Kelley clinging to the Samoan, who staggered backward past the wreckage, blood shooting out of his carotid artery. Kelley was glued to his back, her legs hooked around his waist. As Danny watched, her sister’s head jerked back, and a huge chunk of meat pulled out of the Samoan, full of blood vessels and glands and yellow fat. Danny found Kelley’s eyes, and saw a fire in them she’d never seen before, in life or death.

  Danny’s own eyes flickered to the White Whale alongside, and she saw small, pale faces up there. Some of the children were watching the slaughter.

  Then a big biker with a lot of missing teeth was charging, machete raised high, and Danny’s attention turned to him. She raised the shotgun and saw his face go white with fear; he tried to stop his momentum, but it was too late. Danny expected to see his guts, but the firing pin fell on an empty chamber. The biker kept coming, trying to turn his stumble back into a lunge. She stayed low; his center of gravity was a foot higher than her head. He took it for cowering and aimed a sloppy blow with his machete at Danny’s hunched back as he covered the last meter between them.

  Before the blade had made a quarter of its arc, she was inside his reach, thrusting with her thighs to jam the butt of the shotgun into his groin. She felt her shoulder crash into his pelvis, smelled the stink of piss and corrosion. He flipped and went over her head; the machete clanged on the pavement and he hit the interceptor door hard. Danny spun around, saw he was on his hands and knees, and sent her boot into his crotch with such force that she lost her footing and fell on her back. There was another biker coming. There were so many of them.

  The next one had given her too much room to work. Danny grabbed the abandoned machete with her good hand, jumped behind the man she’d crippled, and when the next biker leaped over his buddy with a musical noise (his neck had something like five pounds of gold chains around it), Danny chopped his left knee with a long, raking blow that split his leather pants open at the knee and exposed a gristly mass of white and red anatomy that was going to hurt a whole lot when his weight came down on it.

  She didn’t bother waiting to see it happen, but ran toward Kelley. Two bikers in matching leathers had confronted the blood-soaked scarecrow crouched over the dead Samoan, maybe brothers, with their long black beards and bald heads. They carried pistols. One raised his weapon at Kelley; they had not yet registered Danny as a threat in the general background of violence and the horror of what they saw on the ground before them. The air was thick with screams and gunshots and crunching metal and the savage curses of people fighting for their lives.

  Danny was too many strides away to stop the gunshot. It cracked the air. A black hole appeared in Kelley’s side, dark matter spitting from the filthy muumuu. Danny saw that Kelley’s right arm was missing below the elbow. It dribbled beads of black blood, but Kelley didn’t seem to know it was gone.

  Before the biker could fire his weapon again, Danny threw the machete at him. She didn’t need it to connect; the idea was to divert their attention. She got lucky, however, and the long blade hit him on his sweat-shining head and split his ear open. He howled, fired into the air, and the second biker’s gun was turning to cut down Danny
when Kelley launched herself at his wrist and stripped it down to the tendons with her yellow teeth. More blood flew. The gun dropped from his fingers. Kelley struck like a cobra at his face and they both went down in a red, glistening heap.

  Danny leaped over the hood of the interceptor and collided with the bald man with the bleeding ear, who couldn’t figure out which threat he needed to address—the berserk living woman or the undead one ripping chunks out of his brother. Danny went to the ground with him, punching his meaty face with her gristle-hand, the hard stump a better fist than nature had given her. She didn’t have the power to knock him out, but she needed to get him defending his face. Both of his hands came up, and there was his gun, held crosswise, not aimed at her; Danny hit the gun with her good hand, and it slapped into the biker’s nose, crushing the cartilage. He kicked her off and she fell across Kelley’s bony back, then tumbled and came up.

  Beside her was the gun that the man underneath Kelley had dropped. Danny whipped it up at the same time the other biker recovered enough to aim. For a long second, they were staring at each other, bloody and panting, across the muzzles of their pistols. Like duelists. A Mexican standoff. The world slowed to a crawl and the only sound Danny could hear was the tide of blood rushing in her ears. She saw him like a photograph—the black beard matted with blood, a bubble of it at his nostril, his nose bent, a dark blue smear where the blood under the skin was flooding beneath the flesh. Wiry black brows and a creased forehead sparkling with sweat. The ragged edge of his ear where the machete had cut. The deep slit in his scalp. He must see her the same way: this battered, dirty redhead with her scars and hard, mottled green eyes. Time for one or both of them to die.

  The difference might have been that Danny cared just a little bit less who died. She fired a nerve-twitch before he did, and his bullet went wide because by the time he yanked the trigger, his front teeth had made a tour of his brain from being shot in the mouth.

  • • •

  After that, it was a series of skirmishes; the hand-to-hand broke apart as the Tribespeople remembered their training for once and started forming groups, getting their backs up against vehicles, covering the compass. It was sloppy and chaotic, but the hard-learned lesson at the truck stop must have been recent enough for them to remember to fight back as units, not every man for himself like the bikers. Danny and Kelley fought together, or at least for the same ground at the same time. The results were the same. Danny snatched up bloody guns wherever she found them and emptied them at anybody she didn’t know, wounding three; she found the machete again and used it to decapitate a dying man who was crawling along with his guts dragging behind him like a bunch of gray balloon animals.

  She ran to the aid of some chooks who were clustered at the entry door of the White Whale and lost sight of Kelley. One of the civilians said there were bikers inside the RV, so Danny hurled herself up the steps inside and chopped the one at the steering wheel until he was puking blood and the other Tribespeople came up after her and threw him overboard through one of the empty window frames.

  Then, through the windshield, Danny saw Kelley again: a dark, skeletal thing, hunched low like a hunter, soaked in blood, the tattered muumuu and sopping bandages clinging to her leathery frame. Kelley jumped with uncanny speed at a biker trying to get his machine upright to escape, and her teeth found his throat. Blood spewed out of the sides of her mouth like the wake of a speedboat. His tearing hands could do nothing against the bear trap power in her limbs, even one-armed.

  Danny jumped down the steps of the White Whale and her chain-scorched leg buckled, but she got up and ran. Somebody was screaming “zeroes!” and she didn’t see any others around. She covered the ten meters at a fast hobble and dragged Kelley off the dying biker by the scruff of her neck. Kelley spun around, hissing, her teeth ribboned with scraps of flesh, and those empty, blood-crazed eyes saw Danny and there was no recognition.

  She immediately went for Danny’s throat, but one-handed, couldn’t drag Danny in close; Danny jammed her elbow under Kelley’s jaw and locked it there.

  “Kelley!” she shouted.

  Her sister kept hissing, her throat gurgling with hot blood.

  “I will destroy you,” Danny said. But she didn’t. She only strained to hold the writhing creature at bay.

  They crouched like that for a long while as the Vandal Reapers’ attack broke and they raced away past them and bullets whickered over their heads. The roar of engines drowned out the cries of the wounded. Danny wanted to take down the ones who came close, but she didn’t dare let go of Kelley. That is, until she saw the kids.

  They must have been in some of the other vehicles, probably thoughtlessly packed up in the Tribe’s haste to get to the train depot; now they were running across the parking lot in a tight group. Danny recognized the eldest among them—Jimmy James, the boy who had been with her since Forest Peak. It looked like he was trying to get the younger ones to the huge derelict church at the back of the lot. Several Tribespeople were running after them, but there were Vandal Reapers riding up at far better speed.

  Danny bellowed for somebody to get after them in a vehicle, but her voice couldn’t be heard. She felt the iron claws of Kelley’s one hand sinking into her own arm; she still couldn’t let go. Maybe it was time to fire that shot she’d reserved long ago. But she no longer had a gun.

  Her eyes followed the children running through the melee. The bikers were closing in. Then one of the kids broke from the pack, sprinting for a tangle of bushes at the margin of the church lawn. There was a small dog at his ankle. It was the Silent Kid. Of course. He was the only one who had a system. He couldn’t know that this time, it was a better idea to stay with the rest.

  The foremost motorcycle bore down on him, and Danny saw his little dog leap up, snapping uselessly at the bike as it thundered past—and then the Silent Kid was snatched up, flung across the gas tank of the motorcycle. The second biker tried to grab one of the kids, but crashed into the cluster and went down; before he could get the machine upright again, the Tribespeople were on him. Danny saw knives flash. Nobody cared what the children witnessed anymore. She had to do something. The other bike was escaping, taking up the rearmost position in what was left of the gang racing down the road.

  Then Topper slewed up astride one of the Vandal’s bikes, his face a bloody mask.

  “The fuck happened here,” he said, seeing Kelley’s bloody, mutilated shape straining against Danny’s arms.

  “Kelley!” Danny shouted again. “Topper, back off.”

  In the next instant, Kelley’s thin lips fell over the teeth and there was a blink of confusion; Danny held her at arm’s length and felt the sharp fingers loosen.

  This time there was recognition in the eyes.

  Danny let go. Kelley stayed still, making no attempt to attack.

  “Kelley, you need to get out of here. Get out now. Don’t stop until you’re fifty klicks away. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not hungry anymore,” Kelley said, tearing the bandages from her head. “I’m alive. I’m fucking alive again.” Danny didn’t know how to take that, so she pushed herself up on adrenaline-weak legs.

  “The fuck we gonna do now,” Topper said, seeing the corpses Kelley had ripped apart.

  “Kelley’s leaving us,” Danny said.

  “I’m okay now,” Kelley objected. “I’m normal again.” She discovered one of her arms was missing and clapped the remaining hand over the stump. “I swear I’m okay now.”

  Danny retrieved the black backpack from the back of the interceptor and climbed in. Kelley reached for the passenger door handle.

  In that moment, the chaos of emotions in Danny’s mind became clear. When she’d struggled with Kelley, they hadn’t been sisters. She had been looking into the face of a zero. There wasn’t anybody inside those cloudy eyes, any more than there was a personality behind the eyes of a shark. If Kelley had now come back—even if she was restored to her old self—it was because she’d torn l
iving meat off a human body. Danny remembered the promise: If Kelley ever came to understand what she was, she intended to kill her sister and eat her heart.

  It was over.

  “No,” Danny said. “We’re done. You go your own way now. Get out of here. I need to go and I can’t fuck around here trying to defend your ass.”

  Kelley looked around her. More and more bloodstained faces were turning their way. Eyes were on her. Everybody had a weapon in hand.

  “Please let me come with you. Please.”

  “You tried to kill me,” Danny said. “You’re blooded now. Are you deaf? Get out of here.”

  At last the message seemed to get through. Her sister took a halting step away, and then another, and finally turned around and moved with a speed Danny hadn’t seen before, hustling away through the wrack of battle. It must have been the human flesh in her gut. She really did seem almost alive. None of the Tribe tried to stop her, but moved out of the way as she passed.

  Danny waited until she was out of sight among the buildings of the slaughterhouse. A couple of tears fell from her eyes, but there wasn’t any grief in them. Just pain.

  She saw Wulf, up on top of the White Whale. He was raising his old Winchester. He alone could still see Kelley’s retreating back.

  “Let her go!” Danny shouted.

  Wulf knew who she was talking to. A long beat went by, and then he let the barrel drift downward.

  There was nothing more to wait for. Danny pulled onto the road and the pursuit team took off, roaring down the pavement after the pall of blue smoke rising from the gang’s retreat.