Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  “You wouldn’t let go of that thing,” the woman said. “Coffee?” she added, opening a thermos.

  Danny’s mouth abruptly filled with water at the thought. The cab was filled with a long-forgotten aroma: good coffee, nutty, sharp, and strong, with a velvety depth like exotic wood smoke. Back at the Tribe they had all drunk freeze-dried instant dissolved in lukewarm water.

  “Yes,” Danny said. There was more to the exchange. She tried to think of the word. “Please,” she added, as if saying “hello” in a language she hadn’t used since high school.

  “There’s something wrong with your head,” the woman said. She had an accent of some kind. Danny would have said Jamaican, and she was pretty sure she’d be wrong.

  “It just happened,” Danny said, and tried to sit up. A great chunk of pain collapsed into her skull and she had to lie down again, gasping involuntarily. She closed her eyes.

  “And you think you can ignore it, am I right? Tough it out. You’re tough, I see that,” the woman said. “Bad-ass. I am also bad-ass, and I have bad legs as well. You can’t ignore physical problems. I think you have a brain injury, unless you have a history of epilepsy or something.”

  “No. Just hung over, I guess,” Danny mumbled, waiting for the lance in her head to withdraw. “Went on a massive bender the last few days. I don’t even know what day it is.” She opened her eyes to find the cup-lid of the thermos held just in front of them. She took it and propped herself up enough to sip it. It burned. Hot, acrid, and rich, black as ink.

  “Fuck, that’s good,” she said.

  “Creature comforts, Mama,” her companion said. “I’m Vaxxine. That’s with two exes, which is funny cos I have two exes in real life. It’s Wednesday.”

  Danny’s eyes were in focus now. She assessed her situation. They were inside the cab of a long-haul tractor-trailer truck. Danny lay on a bed in the little apartment behind the front seats. It was outfitted with ergonomic precision like the first-class cabin of a jumbo jet. There were pockets and compartments everywhere, a coffee machine and miniature microwave near her head, a tiny bathroom at her feet. It could have been the captain’s berth of a submarine, shipshape and efficient.

  Danny turned her attention to her host. Vaxxine was seated in the driver’s position, twisted sideways so she could talk to Danny. Her jeans-clad legs were bone-thin, the knees knobby; they didn’t match her strong, corded arms. Her pants were unzipped and a diaper poked out of the waistband. But then Danny remembered the wheelchair she’d seen before she lost consciousness. A paraplegic truck driver?

  “So you know who I am, and I see you’ve sorted out my legs are just for show. Who are you in your raggedy police uniform with a gun and a corkscrew? You don’t have any identifying papers or marks I could find, unless you count a relief map of Colorado on your back.”

  Danny involuntarily tried to sit up again, and again the hammer came down on her brain. She sloshed coffee over her hand.

  “Sensitive about that? I won’t mention it again,” Vaxxine said. “Me no maco,” she added, turning her accent all the way up.

  Danny was sensitive about her wildly scarred back, but at least she wasn’t sitting in a diaper without the use of her legs. There was that. She had spent three months in a wheelchair after she’d been medevaced out of a combat zone with crushed legs and third-degree burns, and had nothing but sympathy for anyone stuck in one of the damnable things forever. So Danny swallowed her irritation and drank more coffee to chase it down.

  “My name is Danny Adelman. I used to be a sheriff in Southern California.” She didn’t think much else was worth mentioning.

  • • •

  Danny had a view amidships forward to the driving compartment and the windshield, beyond which was an empty parking lot. Up above the cab, there was a deep space that was probably intended as further sleeping accommodation, but Vaxxine had used it for storage: Danny saw boxes of toilet paper, duct tape, ammunition, canned goods, adult diapers, and various other things it was good not to run out of. A helping-hand gripper on a pole hung on the bulkhead; her host could reach up from her chair.

  “Anyway, we need to get your head examined, Danny. Nothing personal,” Vaxxine said, and drank directly from the thermos.

  “It’s a headache, that’s all,” Danny said. She decided to expand her biography a little, in case Vaxxine knew anything about the Tribe’s fate. “I was with a large group traveling around until recently. Just came back for a visit and they were all gone. Do you know what—”

  “I only arrived a little before you showed up,” Vaxxine said. “I was trying to figure out why all the vehicles were sitting there empty like that, when they’d obviously seen recent use. Then you came along and that boy and his dog came racing out to meet you, so I figured you were involved somehow. We barely got you out of there. The boy had to help me get you into the rig, with the zombies coming and all.”

  “I appreciate it,” Danny said. “If you don’t mind me resting up a couple hours, I’ll take the Silent Kid and be out of your hair, unless you need help with anything.”

  “The Silent Kid,” Vaxxine said. “That explains why he’s so quiet. I thought he just didn’t like me.” She laughed at this, so apparently it was funny. Danny didn’t bother to respond.

  • • •

  She must have fallen asleep again, because when she next opened her eyes, the sky outside the windows was purple with twilight and they were driving somewhere. The Kid was sitting in the passenger seat in front, with his snouted dog looking out the windshield with its front paws up on the dashboard and his tongue curling out like a pink wood shaving. Vaxxine was driving. Good enough. Danny threw an arm over the weapons backpack that rocked gently at her side and passed out again.

  2

  The hospital looked like a mirage. There wasn’t anything around it except dead cornfields. It rose out of a dry ocean of leaves like the city of Oz, a modern building of green-tinted glass and bright steel. From a distance, it appeared that nothing was wrong with it, as if the disaster had passed it by. But as they drove closer, details revealed that the hospital had not escaped unscathed.

  Danny was sitting in the passenger seat by now, having recovered sufficiently from the pain in her head, and she had been getting carsick lying in the back. The Silent Kid was on the bed now, playing tug of war with the Boston Terrier. Vaxxine drove the bobtail rig ably with customized hand controls that were bolted onto the foot pedals and rose up the steering column; Danny had seen similar units during her time at VA hospitals, but never on a machine this size. Vaxxine appeared completely comfortable with the ten-speed gearbox, and floated the gears as ably as any professional driver, using the clutch only to start and stop. It must have been doubly complicated when it all had to be done with hands alone.

  Once Danny was upright and had some Advil in her, Vaxxine had started to talk. And she didn’t stop until the hospital came into view. She was like a castaway on a desert island: Without companionship, it seemed all the conversations she might otherwise have had were stored up inside her head, and now she was getting them all out. She seemed to have an inexhaustible reservoir of trivia, observations, and theories about every subject. The topic of most interest to Danny was how Vaxxine came to survive at all.

  “I used to be a dancer,” she’d said, as they passed through a landscape of big hills swathed in brown grass. “Go-go and that. Then I had a skiing accident. Turns out it’s true what they say. Colored folk can’t ski. I broke my back. So I was all ‘okay, note to self, need new life,’ and I was pretty good at some things, I’m organized, get that from my mother’s side of the family. So I got organized and found out all about how cripples fit in. And basically they don’t. So I had to start coming up with work-arounds. ’Cause there wasn’t anything good on TV.

  “So I was doing that, and I got a job at the Circle Hotel in Hollywood at the pool bar, which was cool because the whole barback was just big enough for one person standing up, like an information booth.
But I couldn’t stand up. So I found this company made stand-up wheelchairs and that worked out pretty good, except it freaked a few people out ’cause they would come over for a drink and be all normal and then they’d see I was in this body brace and down there was this torture chamber looking thing with wheels. But I was making a living. Plus I got sympathy tips. ‘Here’s ten bucks, I’m going to dive off the board now,’ I think was the feeling.”

  “I’m from outside Los Angeles myself,” Danny interjected. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “My theory is to keep moving,” Vaxxine said. “Otherwise they find you. Plus, I got wheels. I’m made to keep rolling.”

  “So you’re at the hotel bar—” Danny prompted.

  “It was Fourth of July weekend, you remember the occasion. Hasn’t been the same holiday since. I was in the booth serving up Red, White, and Blues—”

  “Which are?”

  “Grenadine, peach schnapps, and Blue Curaçao stripes on shaved ice.”

  “Fuuuuck.” Danny’s stomach lurched.

  “Right? But they were a big hit. So it’s crowded, beautiful people everywhere, sun shining down, celebrity sightings every ten minutes, all good. Then Emilio, he worked there, too, comes on over to my booth to see if I need a break, ’cause he can spot me a few minutes, he’s one of our reserve bartenders. And he mentions there’s some weird shit going around. I’m like, ‘What?’ and he’s like, ‘On the TV in the lobby bar, there’s riots or whatnot happening left and right.’ So I’m like, okay, I’ll check this out, and I lower myself from stand to sit and wheel on out of there. The pool is behind the lobby on the ground level with a courtyard around it, so it was a quick roll.

  “There was a big crowd of people watching the TV over the main bar, but it didn’t have sound. Management thought sound on the TV was low-class. So we’re just looking at these pictures of people in China and India and places running around in huge crowds, like riots only they were just running and screaming and falling down. Then they’d cut to some guys making a world-record barbecue or something for the Fourth.”

  “I remember that,” Danny said. “The Internet, too. It was like a news blackout except it wasn’t exactly a blackout.” Despite herself she was caught up in the story, remembering that day. “It was like all the media companies decided the story was too much of a downer.”

  “And then they hit the Internet kill switch, I think,” Vaxxine said. “But we don’t need conspiracy theories anymore. I remember there was a live news feed out of Boston where they were supposed to be doing a parade, and all these brass marching bands were going along and suddenly these running people come tearing straight through the parade. Like streakers, only not naked. Just random people. I thought it was a flash mob thing. But more and more were running through, and I saw a guy with a tuba get knocked down by one of the runners, and then he got up like he was getting attacked by a swarm of bees, and started running. Still had the tuba, flashing in the sun. Everybody around me in the lobby was kind of freaked out. Even the valet parking guys had come in by now. Then of course the news cut over to some fluff story about a cornfield in Iowa mowed in the shape of a giant American flag.

  “I was in my chair so people kept getting between me and the TV, and I didn’t want to go up in the standing position because everybody always wants to talk about it and I kind of didn’t want to discuss it right then. So I wheeled over to the doors. I don’t know if you know the layout of the Circle, but it looks out on Hollywood and La Brea on the restaurant bar side and the lobby doors are on Marshfield. So it’s a big intersection.”

  Danny nodded her familiarity with the area, although she didn’t actually remember it at all. It hurt to nod.

  Vaxxine went on: “I saw these people run across the intersection, and they were screaming. Going east-west. The screaming matched what we saw on the TV, so people didn’t notice it at first. It was like the sound had come on. Then somebody said “Oh, my God,” and now everybody turned around to look. I was right up against the lobby window at this point. Ringside seat. More and more people kept running through. A big fat guy got hit by a car. Horns were going. There was a four-car fender-bender a second later.

  “People were running the other way to help the fat guy, because he flew up in the air, and he was on the ground, moving like he was still running. But then the people who went to help him freaked out and a couple of them started running, in whatever direction. There wasn’t any sense they had somewhere they were trying to get to. I remember a lot of people in the hotel were looking down the streets trying to figure out if there was a fire or a terrorist attack or something.

  “I was getting claustrophobic at this point because people were pushing me up against the glass. A lot of people went outside for a better look, and they blocked my view from there, too. Then one of the runners came straight at the windows. Just ran like crazy. I saw him coming. His eyes were rolled up and he had his hands in the air and he was screaming bloody hell. Everybody outside was like diving out of the way and then BAM he ran straight into the glass, right into the window I was at, and I saw his nose and mouth sort of explode against the window. It was horrible. Blood and snot and bits of teeth. He fell down, of course. Then the onlookers outside started running. A couple of people came into the hotel because it was obviously getting freaky-deaky in the street, more and more people running around screaming.

  “This went on for a long time, I think. I don’t know. It seemed like forever. Everybody wanted their car back all of a sudden and the valets were running around, people were checking out in a hurry or demanding to know what was going on. They wanted to speak to the manager, like that would make any difference. Then a fire truck came through the intersection at top speed headed for Hollywood and Highland, I think, because there was smoke rising up from down that way. It got slammed by a pickup truck doing fifty. It jackknifed and tipped over. Fell on about ten running people. Cars were piling up all over by now. People in the hotel just straight up panicked.

  “Now, you don’t know me, but you know I’m in a chair, and you can imagine what a panic in a crowded hotel lobby was like from my perspective. I jammed my way into one of the elevators, hacking ankles with my footrests left and right. They’re designed for that, I think. Lot of people were going upstairs for a better view. I got off on some random floor. It was the eighth floor, as I eventually found out.

  “So nobody was around at that level except some people trying to leave. They had a couple of small kids and their rollaway suitcases with them. I was glad to be out of the crowd, is all I knew. I was still worried about abandoning my post at the poolside bar, can you believe it? It had been about twenty minutes since Emilio told me I could take a break, and at that point, even with the fire truck tipping over, I still somehow thought this was just some kind of temporary freak-out. So I went to the service closet by the elevators, because there’s a staff phone in there. But I couldn’t get through. Not on any line. It was ringing, but nobody was picking up.

  “I had the service closet door closed, because it’s hotel policy. They don’t want guests seeing the vomit cleanup gear and dirty mops. Especially when it’s stored right next to the spare minibar soft drinks and snacks. But then I heard the same screaming like outside, except it was inside the hotel. I mean, it was this high-pitched screaming coming up the elevator shafts. It went on and on. I just sat there with the phone against my head like a dumbass for the longest time. I heard glass breaking. The whole building shook at one point.

  “I wheeled myself out of the closet because I couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on, and rolled over to the windows by the elevators. Floor to ceiling, so I had me a fine view. At this point I had the place to myself. Nobody was stopping at that level any longer, there was just screaming and chaos downstairs, coming up the elevators and fire stairs like somebody was watching a disaster movie on a TV somewhere. It didn’t sound real.

  “But it looked real. There was black smoke coming up past my window fr
om down below; I couldn’t see what was burning, but I thought it was part of the hotel, which as you can imagine scared the crap out of me. When you’re a wheelie, there’s no such thing as an emergency exit. Fire bells were ringing downstairs for the longest time, and then somebody must have switched them off.

  “Past the smoke, there was the whole intersection and I could see up and down six or eight blocks of Hollywood fucking Boulevard, and it was pandemonium. Huge crowds of people running, other people trying to get out of the way, cars crashing, shit knocking over, fires—the fire truck had this huge pile of running people smashed up against it, like they just charged straight into it. I saw a couple of firemen up on top of it, which was the side, actually, and they couldn’t do a thing except wave their arms to try to get people to stop. Didn’t work.

  “I sat there and watched forever. Just couldn’t look away. I saw the shadow of the hotel stretch across the intersection, that’s how long I was there. It was late afternoon when the running people started to thin out, and the screaming was kind of easing off somewhat from downstairs. I felt awful. I was scared to death, and it seemed like I should be doing something. When you’re in the chair that kind of stuff drives you barmy. You see somebody drowning, you can yell ‘help!’ but you can’t do a damn thing. You see an accident, you can call the police but you can’t assist. I mean you can try but it’s futile. So I sat there and felt awful . . . but I just didn’t try to do anything.

  “The one thing I did do was use my phone. I called my mother back home. It was everywhere, apparently. I mean like all around the world. My mother is in Trini, that’s Trinidad, and it wasn’t there, but like all over the mainland countries. If I’d known that was my last call, I’d have made it different.”

  “I don’t remember the last call I made. It might have been trying to get hold of my sister,” Danny said.