Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  “Bob G. Ingersoll said something about six score years ago,” he began, and paused to gather the words. “The dead don’t suffer.” He didn’t add anything else, so Danny nodded and began gathering up the limbs of her sister. That was his idea of an epitaph.

  The moon rose bleary above the horizon as she carried the limp weight of her sister out into the fields. Wulf stayed with the interceptor. This wasn’t his grief.

  Danny waited beside Kelley all night in a field down the long farm road. It was cold, and she shivered and flexed her remaining fingers and suffered and hated. All the pent-up fury at the Tribe—and herself—was filling her mind, and she couldn’t stop it.

  She sat still and kept her vigil, kneeling beside the body, not knowing what she was supposed to do. The stars turned overhead, winking in a sky of darkest ultramarine blue. The Milky Way was a trail of frozen breath across it, the moon a bowl of snow. Danny looked into the night and blinked back tears, unable to let the sorrow loose. She hoped that Wulf would drive away and leave her. He did not. In fact, he was no longer in the interceptor. He had melted away into the night at some point, as he often did.

  At some deep, silent hour, three moaners shuffled through the straw, attracted by Danny’s scent. She reflexively drew her pistol, but did not shoot as they came nearer. By the moonlight she could see them: a naked girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, halfway through puberty forever, mottled and pale, missing a big scoop of flesh from one thigh. The crater was layered like a ragged onion inside. There was an older man who might have been the farmer, now missing his scalp and ears. The third was a bent old woman trailing ropes of rotten intestines.

  They came within fifteen yards of Danny and stopped. They scented the air, making their soughing moans as they tested the stink of flesh. But they came no nearer. It had to be Kelley. Even inanimate, the thinkers must have possessed that warning smell moaners feared. For a time, the trio of zeroes stood and swayed and swallowed the cold air. Then they shuffled away, all in the same direction, like a family of ghosts.

  Danny wondered if they knew each other in life. If they were relations. Or if the undead had simply found their way here coincidentally, all drawn by the same faint smell of humanity. She struggled with something, a thought she’d been suppressing all this time. The undead had lived once. They had been family. She remembered some survivors who had made the argument that the dead deserved respect, even kindness, despite their savage hunger. After all, there were people with repellent diseases who were loved. Danny might include herself among the unlovable living, scarred and mean and bitter as she was, and yet there were some who cared for her.

  Was it possible that she was wrong? Did all the undead deserve something more than destruction, not just her sister? Was there some small observation that ought to be made when they were dispatched, the way cavemen had honored their kills in the ancient past? Danny didn’t know; she didn’t have that kind of philosophical mind. But she had to acknowledge that what made Kelley different from all the rest of her kind wasn’t just the peculiar remembrance of self with which she had been endowed. It was Danny’s own love. She had chosen to love Kelley, regardless of her condition. In that instant of reanimation it had somehow made the difference.

  It seemed the thing that had kept Kelley from killing the living was the love of one living person. Danny had seen moaners slaughter their loved ones without hesitation. Maybe thinkers were closer to being alive. Maybe they were only sick. Danny had heard that drug addicts should be treated as people with a medical condition. Until she’d found herself relying on the bottle to get to sleep, she sneered at that idea. It could be that the thinkers were more like that, somehow.

  With Kelley destroyed, she would probably never know.

  She was numb, close to freezing. But Danny maintained her watch until dawn, shivering violently, hoping against hope that Kelley would come back one more time.

  When the sky began to glow and Kelley’s remains were rimed with frost, Danny knew it was over.

  She wanted to bury her sister, but she didn’t have a shovel and the ground was as hard as an iron pan. So she stirred her own aching limbs and arranged the corpse with legs and arms tidily straight, unwound the bandages around Kelley’s face and neck, and then went to the trunk of the interceptor and collected every bottle she’d been keeping there. She bathed her sister in vodka and whiskey and Everclear, tequila and sochu and rum. The fumes made her eyes water and that was as close to tears as she would allow herself.

  It took all the will she had to drag out the lighter. It seemed like some kind of prayer was in order, but if there had ever been a God, He had left this world behind. She stared at the wavering flame of the lighter, and couldn’t touch it to the alcohol-soaked rags. To do this thing was to acknowledge it was truly the end. Even in her hungry, reanimated state, devoid of emotions or attachments, Kelley had been there, somehow. Danny had kept that tiny essence going, her greatest failure remaining incomplete.

  She stared at the flame, saw the way it glistened on the alcohol-wet corpse, and could not start the blaze.

  “Forgive me,” Danny whispered at last, and took out her hunting knife and rose up on her knees as if to pray beside the corpse.

  19

  Wulf returned ten minutes after sunrise, reeking of spirits; he emerged from a field of dried corn like a pagan mud effigy come to life. Danny was sitting in the driver’s seat of the interceptor, so Wulf went around to the passenger side. Danny’s weapons backpack was on the seat; he was going to drop it on the floor, but Danny snatched it away and put it in her lap instead.

  Wulf settled himself into the vehicle, sighed a great gust of alcohol at the windshield, and said, “I’m outta liquor.”

  “Me, too,” Danny said.

  They drove onward toward nowhere in particular, looking for a place to refill. In the rearview mirrors, a column of smoke rose up to mark the place they had just left behind.

  “That bonfire for her?” Wulf asked, after a while.

  “I didn’t want the crows to eat her,” Danny said.

  “They’ll eat us all,” Wulf said. He looked like a crow himself, a grizzled elder bird.

  • • •

  They found a town with one church, two streets, and three liquor stores. There was an overturned school bus on the main drag, and even as they rolled up near town, Danny and Wulf were counting the zeroes out loud.

  “I got sixteen,” Wulf said.

  “They look like kids,” Danny said.

  “Zeroes all the same. Must have died in the bus wreck,” he added, as if that made it okay somehow. “How do we want to handle this?”

  “If we go down the main street, we’re going to be at close quarters with a lot of wreckage,” Danny observed. “I’d go in the back way. But we can’t see what’s there.”

  “We can take those things. They ain’t much,” Wulf said. Danny thought his judgment might be a little clouded by his thirst. But they probably could. Small zeroes were weaker and couldn’t go for the head and neck as effectively. Besides, the presence of moaners meant there weren’t any thinkers or hunters around.

  Eventually they settled on a plan. It revolved around the unexpected fact that Wulf was a capable driver. There was a tow truck outside the town with a car rusting away on the hooks, its front end still suspended. They crouch-walked up to it, using abandoned vehicles for cover and a favorable breeze to keep their smell from reaching town. The tow driver was sprawled next to the cab; exposure and vermin had destroyed what was left of him, but the name MARTIN embroidered on his polyester shirt remained legible.

  The elderly truck had a primitive ignition, which Danny quickly defeated with a screwdriver; she had a portable jumper battery of sufficient amperage to get the truck started, but worried the gas in the tanks might not be good anymore.

  However, the truck started, belching smoke the color of five-o’clock shadow. Danny lowered the boom and disengaged the car from the hooks while Wulf laid down suppressing fire wi
th his beloved rifle, popping the small zombies in the head as they emerged from town to see what the noise was about. Then Danny ran back to the interceptor and Wulf shoved himself up into the cab. The tow truck disappeared in twin plumes of choking blue smoke, then emerged at ramming speed, headed for the liquor store at the near end of town.

  He drove the truck around the back of the store, across the few parking spaces, and crashed straight into the loading doors, exploding several cases of foul beer that had been weathering outside since the fall of mankind.

  Danny, meanwhile, pulled the interceptor up at the rear corner of the building so she had a view down the back and side, and for five minutes she practiced shooting with a pistol. Any time a gray, leathery head emerged from cover, she punched a hole in it. Wulf had shot four earlier; Danny took down three of her own before Wulf emerged with his first armload of bottles, dumping them into a noisy-wheeled shopping cart.

  He made three trips inside before there were too many zeroes to shoot; as soon as Danny shouted “Incoming!” he knew she couldn’t take them all down, and he shoved the laden cart into motion. He made it to the trunk of the interceptor with half a minute to spare and transferred the bottles inside like there was a prize involved. Then he dashed around to the passenger door.

  A zero that hadn’t been more than three or four years old when it died followed him right up to the window. Its small, shrunken face was a caricature of human features, with cavernous eye sockets and tiny yellow teeth. A thin, rat-eaten hand scraped at the glass, finger-bones scratching clean tracks through the dried-on blood.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I ain’t any good with kids,” Wulf said.

  • • •

  After that, the plan wrote itself. They had a 360 horsepower hemi-equipped vehicle, several gallons of hard liquor, five hundred rounds of mixed ammunition, and a couple of family-size bags of stale Funyuns. Danny drove until near midday, when they found a suitable location: a water tower atop a small hill, overlooking the entire landscape for miles in every direction. There wasn’t much cover there should anything want to attack; there was a tall fence around the tower, which Danny locked behind them with one of the padlock-and-chain combinations she kept at hand in the trunk. If anything wanted to come up the ladder on the leg of the tower, it was going to make a lot of noise and present a perfect head exposure to do so.

  The two of them climbed the tower: the old, bearlike man, stinking and weather-beaten, and the young woman with the scars and the ancient green eyes. Then they hauled their supplies up behind them on a rope.

  Shortly thereafter, the drinking commenced.

  20

  Neither of them had directly said what they had in mind when they started their bender. It wasn’t the sort of thing that bore speaking about.

  Danny hadn’t expected Wulf to break ranks with the Tribe, especially in support of anything to do with Kelley. Wulf hated the zeroes on a level that transcended the fact of them. They offended his sense of how the universe should operate. Danny regarded them as dangerous predators, for the most part; the exception was the thinkers, which she considered to be more like human beings than zeroes—meaning they were also more dangerous. No matter what, though, the real enemy in the world was still bad-hearted living humans.

  But when the moment came, Wulf was the one who stepped forward and got Danny out of there, although he hated what Kelley was the most of all. He had left the Tribe, and in so doing probably forfeited his place in it. They had been natural enemies once, the vagrant and the cop; now they were two broke-down veterans of war, punching their way through an ugly world.

  • • •

  They drank the good stuff first: searing, smoke-flavored single malt washed down with an occasional swig of water. They each had their own bottles, and kept working until they drained them. Wulf could drink more than Danny, but she was the best competition he’d ever met.

  Danny started to feel the booze after she’d drunk the first bottle down to the top of the label. It was the place she spent a lot of time—nursing a low-level buzz that took the edge off everything but didn’t interfere with what she had to do. She tried to maintain that level of buzz as often as possible; it made her seem more agreeable to others, which was a benefit, but the chief effect was to make others seem more agreeable to her.

  Wulf was a third of the way through his bottle. While Danny took small sips at short intervals, he favored massive chugs every ten minutes or so. Danny observed his technique with admiration. She watched the golden bubbles roiling up like jellyfish through the cruel, beautiful liquid, amber and hot to the eye. Six deep swallows and two fingers of the bottle emptied.

  She tried that approach, and it damn near killed her. Which was fine. The end game, although neither of them had bothered to articulate it, could include death, if it came to that. Glorious drunken death. She took four massive pulls, filling her throat with whiskey, and it felt like molten lava. It hit her belly like a hammer, but that was secondary; the raw alcohol stripped the skin out of her gullet and set it on fire. The fumes punched the air out of her lungs. She retched and coughed until her eyes sparkled with purple and green fireworks and she was lying on her side. Her eyes streamed and there was snot hanging out of her nose.

  Wulf observed this impassively. “You’re doin’ it wrong,” he said, and proceeded to drink another two inches of whiskey out of his bottle with swallows that sounded like marching boots. Then he belched, and Danny thought she could see his whiskers turning to ash in the shock wave. Her head was starting to hurt.

  “You in this all the way, Sheriff?” Wulf inquired, fixing her with a ham-colored eyeball. His nose had lit up like a stoplight.

  “Cheers,” Danny said, and set to drinking again. It was getting very chilly. Their breath made ostrich plumes around their heads. They shrugged sleeping bags over their shoulders, camo models from the trunk of the interceptor. She used them both for bedding; Kelley hadn’t needed to sleep.

  • • •

  An hour into the binge, Danny was no longer altogether in command of herself. Gravity had ceased to operate on her nervous system; things weighed the same and moved the same, but they didn’t feel the same. That was the tricky place where legions of high-school-aged kids got into trouble, back before the end of the world when drunk driving was a matter of concern. Danny’s limbs were filled with what felt like a mixture of helium and elastic; it took skill and experience to move normally, to speak clearly.

  The real, hardcore drunk—and Danny felt she could compete in that league—was aware of all the subtle ways that intoxication gave itself away. It was a point of pride not to reveal the effects of alcohol until they were absolutely impossible to ignore: Keep the motions steady, the hands moving accurately, the speech clear and articulate. But any quality drunk knew that overarticulated speech was a sign of the influence. It had to look natural. You couldn’t allow your movements to become too precise or careful, like a kid trying to operate a coin-operated claw over a heap of stuffed toys to impress his girlfriend.

  “You know what the trick is?” Danny said.

  “What is it?” Wulf asked, peering at her over the neck of his bottle.

  “They jam those fucking stuffed toys in so tight that the claw can’t pull ’em free. It’s a bullshit trick.”

  “What in the name of blue-nutted monkey fuck are you speaking of, Sheriff?”

  “You know,” Danny said.

  “I probably do,” he said, philosophically, and drained his bottle almost to the bottom.

  Wulf had now consumed enough alcohol to kill a nondrinker. Danny was about three-fifths of the way through her own bottle, and she knew her time was running out—the alcohol wasn’t all metabolized yet, but when it hit, she would pass out. She needed a leaner mixture, like giving a carburetor more air so the engine didn’t drown in gas. She drank a good measure of water, although her stomach recoiled in horror at the influx of cold liquid. Wulf breached a bag of Funyuns and dumped them on the metal de
ck of the water tower; they ate them in greasy handfuls. Then Danny sat back and watched the horizon sway from side to side. The tower seemed to be three hundred kilometers tall. She had to cling to the railing. But it felt good. If she didn’t puke, she was right in the sweet spot.

  “Sheriff, you and me known each other a while. I used to think you were a cunt, but I changed my mind a long time back. You got the right stuff.”

  “That’s right decent of you, Wolfman,” Danny said, struggling to form the words. “I always thought you were a walking pile of ass. I was right.”

  They both laughed about this until Danny threw up in her mouth. She ate some more Funyuns and drank more water. “Got to pace myself,” she remarked.

  “Anyways,” Wulf said, “I brung something special because I ain’t going back to that pack of helpless assholes. So I brung it with me, and I want to raise a fuckin’ toast to your sister, God rest her soul, if any. Viola,” he concluded, and pulled a very special bottle out of his filthy jacket. It smelled like polecats, but the label said it was French.

  “Wine?” Danny said. She didn’t know a thing about wine. She drank for effect. Wine had too much water in it. Inefficient for her purposes.

  “This ain’t fuckin’ wine, Sheriff. Found this particular artifact a couple months ago when we went through Utah. It’s Château Lafite fuckin’ Rothschild. This right here”—now he peered at the label, as if to verify it hadn’t been swapped with an inferior bottle—“is a 1959 Pauillac, at the peak of its fuckin’ powers. You will never set your heathen lips to anything as good as this. It ain’t the ’89, but this stuff tastes like a cherry orchard in a mountain forest on a warm summer day. Got a finish on it sixty feet long. I ain’t a hunnerd percent sure you’re worthy of this thing, but it’s now or never. You suffered a grievous loss yesterday. I only wish we didn’t have to drink it out of the goddamn bottle.”