Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  The three of them were walking down the hall now, voices breaking up into echoes, their footsteps clattering. They’d gone to the left, Danny noted. Exit that way. She opened only the eye farthest from the door, in case anyone was looking into the room, and glanced around. It was indeed a classroom. Dusty light came through the blinds in hot white strips, falling across a second bed nearer the windows. There was a teenager in that bed, a boy, with his head and arms wrapped in bandages. His eyes were open but nobody was inside looking out. Danny could hear voices elsewhere, and squeaking shoes. There must be several rooms with patients in them.

  While she lay there trying to decide what to do, she fell asleep again.

  • • •

  When she awoke, it was dark outside. Danny didn’t like sleeping in proper buildings anymore. They didn’t offer real safety, unless devoid of windows and doors, and they couldn’t be started up and driven away in an emergency. Sheds and barns were okay. Nowhere to hide and few ways in and out, simple to defend. But this place sounded like a lot of rooms, hallways, stairs. Glass everywhere. No good. But from the conversation she’d overheard, she must be in Happy Town proper. The guards had spoken of the one-child rule. She cursed Vaxxine’s stupidity. Who else could it have been they were talking about, and the one child must be the Silent Kid.

  That jolted her fully awake. She sat up, despite the pain that zipped through her skull like a coarse rope through tender hands. The Kid. He might already have been sent to the summer camp place Joe had described. In one of those cattle cars. Topper hadn’t said what day of the week they took the kids away on. How long had she been in this place? She listened for activity in the hallway and heard nothing. There was only a small night-light to illuminate the room, so it must be quite late.

  As far as she was concerned, she had been captured by the enemy. Now, while they still thought she was incapacitated, was her chance to reconnoiter the area and develop a game plan. Simple escape was out of the question. Not while the Silent Kid’s welfare hung in the balance. She had memorized the layout of Happy Town; the school, if it was the one she’d seen from the ridge, was on the western side of town, with a suburban neighborhood between it and downtown.

  Danny swung her feet over the side of the bed, slipping into stealth mode despite the thumping in her head. This was it: time to do the stupid Rambo commando shit and sneak around after all. There weren’t any monitors attached to her, nor any IV tubes (unlike her fellow-patient in the room). She spared a glance at the other bed. No response. He had the brain-dead look that Danny had grown familiar with when she used to visit her wounded friend Harlan at the VA hospital. She took a brief inventory of her situation: loose pink drawstring pajama pants and a short-sleeved shirt of the kind nurses wore, with little teddy bears all over it on a jolly blue background.

  None of her gear was in the room—utility belt and uniform were elsewhere, along with her boots. But someone had left a tray on a table by the door with various commonplace medical items on it. Danny saw there was a pile of clothing on a chair next to the comatose teenager, and under the chair a pair of black Converse All-Stars. Several sizes too large for her. She pulled on his socks and laced the shoes as tight as she could, feeling like a clown because the toes were two inches longer than her feet; bending to tie them, it felt like someone was hitting her in the back of the skull with a frying pan. She saw sparkling lights and almost blacked out.

  Once the burning feathers had cleared from behind her eyes, she carefully stood up, took the boy’s hooded sweatshirt, and crept to the door. She examined the contents of the tray table and selected a disposable scalpel, held it in her good hand so the blade was concealed against her arm, and draped the sweatshirt over that. Then she cracked the door slightly and checked the hallway beyond.

  The floor was smooth and clean and the sneakers made no sound, so she had the advantage of silence as she stole through the hospital. It had definitely been a grade school before; most of the bulletin boards still wore the last few days of crayon drawings, homework assignments, and notices that had been there when the dead rose up. The only light came from red emergency exit signs and floodlights outside the windows here and there. They had a good supply of electricity in Happy Town, but they didn’t waste it at night. Danny took a left, the direction she’d heard Joe and the guards go, and after a couple of minutes reached a stair hall full of steel lockers that must have been the central hub of the school.

  There were offices off to the right, and a classroom to the left, with BURN UNIT taped to the glass in the door. Somebody was crying the night away in there. Danny had done the same, long ago and far away. The stairs downward led to the old nurse’s station, shop class, and athletic lockers; upstairs was WARDS, according to the notice written with Magic Marker directly on the plaster. If most of the patients were up there, Danny thought her level, the ground floor, could be for special cases. So she might not have a lot of time to look around. Fuck it, she decided. She wasn’t a prisoner yet. There was an exterior door on the stair landing. She crossed to it and looked out through the wire-reinforced glass. Guards outside. Not the same ones she’d seen earlier, but three equally well-armed men, stamping and slapping their sides in the cold.

  Danny went down the basement stairs. Beneath the school, the concrete walls radiated damp cold. She realized why the school had been chosen for their temporary hospital—they didn’t need a school because there weren’t any children. They were all hidden away upriver. She wondered why she didn’t see any medical staff in the halls. She’d seen a clock in the stairwell that claimed it was 2:00 a.m., but hospitals didn’t keep business hours. They must have been understaffed, or it could be some kind of security thing. She’d encountered that in Pakistan—civilian hospitals closed at night by the military, as if they were cafeterias. In the morning, the staff was allowed back in to clean up the mess and remove anyone who had died overnight. But she had to remain vigilant. She hadn’t seen any security cameras, but it didn’t mean there wasn’t surveillance.

  She kept on moving, ready to defend or attack.

  Less than fifteen minutes after Danny had gotten out of bed, she was outside the school. She’d emerged through a narrow tilting window over the sinks in the boys’ locker room into a light well set in the school yard, like a foxhole; even as she took stock of her situation, two additional guards strolled past, talking in low voices, and went around the corner of the school to Danny’s left. There were several portable classrooms and storage containers down that way. The icy winter air had shocked Danny’s system enough that she realized what she was doing didn’t make any sense. She wasn’t going to find the Silent Kid in an unfamiliar town in the middle of the night. But neither could she lie quietly in bed until some asshole decided whether to throw her out or not. She needed to get in front of her situation. Recon was a good start. See the lay of the land.

  Danny pulled the sweatshirt on and followed the guards—the safest place to be was behind the most recent patrol; otherwise you’d be in front of the next one.

  She reached a Dumpster at the wire fence that surrounded the playground and crouched down against it. She was freezing. It was a cold night, and her hospital clothes were tissue-thin; her breath smoked in the air and lingered, frozen. Her feet were already numb. The Dumpster was warm to the touch, probably because it was seething with microbial activity on the inside. Danny pressed her seven digits against it to get some feeling back, then took up the scalpel again and slunk along the fence at a low crouch until she came to a place where a vehicle had crashed through it at some point in the past. Nobody had repaired the damage; someone had stood a sheet of plywood against the torn wire. Security in Happy Town was absolutely terrible. It reminded her of the TSA—security theater to reassure the people on the inside, not to discourage threats on the outside.

  Five minutes later, Danny was moving as swiftly as her cold-struck feet would carry her through the deserted suburbs of Happy Town, with downtown directly ahead.

&nb
sp; 2

  The first thing Danny needed was warmth, or she wasn’t going to be able to accomplish anything else. Besides, her outfit was impossibly conspicuous, the sweatshirt light gray and her pants flashing in the dark like a whitetail deer’s ass. Danny crossed the lawn of the nearest house. The grass was overgrown and matted down with frost, but the house appeared to be intact. As she approached, Danny discovered the house was occupied. There wasn’t any electricity, but a ceramic oil lamp shaped like a lighthouse was burning in the living room. She could see someone asleep on the couch. There was an automatic rifle propped up against the wall. They must have quartered people in these houses. She had to assume that nowhere was vacant until proven so.

  Luck was with her, however. There was a Jeep with a soft top in the driveway of the house, and in the backseat someone had left a dark-colored insulated jacket. Danny slashed the top with the scalpel, extracted the jacket, and zipped it on over the sweatshirt. It was also far too large, the sleeves hanging down past her fingertips. She was still cold, but it wasn’t unbearable now. And she was slightly less visible. She searched the pockets for anything useful, then continued toward downtown, not on the sidewalk as before, but behind a shaggy hedge that ran alongside it in front of the row of houses. A van with several silhouetted people inside drove past; she got down behind the bushes. The engine noise provided cover. Danny hurried along as soon as the van passed, less stealthily than before. A big dog barked at her from inside a house, but whoever shouted at it must have assumed the dog was barking at the van.

  The core of Happy Town looked quite ordinary from street level, much as it did from above. Although there were no lights at this hour except for floodlights mounted on rooftops, washing back and forth across intersections, the buildings seemed to be in good condition, with not too many broken windows or burned-out facades. The abandoned vehicles and wrecks were absent from the streets. There wasn’t much trash in the gutters or broken glass glittering across the sidewalks. She could see the railway station at the far end of the street, and the big white church wasn’t far from her position.

  It reminded her a little of Potter, California, a town that had figured prominently in her initial search for Kelley a lifetime ago, where she had fought a savage battle against rogue paramilitary elements and zeroes alike. The layout was nothing like the same, and the style of buildings was different, but the presence of a railroad passing through town recalled those desperate hours to her mind. It made sense: The rails were probably the means by which America would someday be stitched back together, as if the clock had been turned back to 1869.

  The Wild West was everywhere now. But this town was inhabited by the living, not the undead. She could sense the presence of many people, but saw nobody. There was a curfew in effect; during their mountainside vigil she and Topper had heard the siren wail and watched the citizens scuttle indoors, precisely at 2300 hours. She heard an engine approaching and slipped around behind the church when she saw the van coming back. Getting shot on sight wasn’t going to advance the Silent Kid’s cause.

  As she shivered in the deep shadow behind the church, watching the van drive away into the suburbs, Danny saw a couple of people slip into view from between what had once been a drugstore and a skateboarding shop. They were trying not to be seen, that was immediately clear; they were wrapped in dark blankets and hunched down low. She watched as they hustled across the wide street, zigzagging around the spotlit areas. It wasn’t clear where they were heading. Halfway down the street, a crack snapped through the crisp night air, and the foremost of the people cried out and fell to the ground. A woman. Whistles blew, and several doorways were flung open; a dozen armed men raced into the street. They wore the blaze orange vests.

  The two fugitives were surrounded. A minute later, the security van returned. The prisoners were thrown into the back; the guards were indifferent to the cries of pain from the woman. The other chook was a man, and he argued loudly until someone punched him in the teeth. The doors of the truck slammed shut.

  Danny observed dozens of faces hovering in upstairs windows along the street, pale ghosts keeping out of the light. The whole town was inhabited, but there were no lights inside and nobody wanted to show themselves. Now the blaze orange security team spread out, looking for additional fugitives. Danny could hear the leader barking orders.

  She cursed behind her teeth—bad luck. Now she had to get indoors or find some other way to vanish. She moved along the flank of the church and ducked into a vestibule, her back to the door.

  There was a shadow black as paint there. A couple of men ran past the end of the church, conducting the most half-assed sweep Danny had ever witnessed, and were gone. She forced herself to breathe again. Then she felt the door move against her back, and warm, stale air eddied out through the gap. Danny gripped the scalpel firmly in her fist and slipped inside the church.

  3

  Although it was dark outside, it was darker in the church, and Danny was glad of it. She could hear someone moving around in front of her somewhere in another room; she had entered near the back of the building, which was divided up into small spaces. This one appeared to be a mudroom, with linoleum on the floor and coatracks all around the walls. A patch of searchlight crawled through a small window, revealing an electric space heater on the floor, but it wasn’t working. Still, it was warmer inside than out. Danny was struck by a fit of shivering that convulsed her entire frame, and she crouched with her knees against her chin while waiting for it to pass. The headache that took her down seemed to have gone away entirely. Sensation was returning to her feet, which was a mixed blessing—now they stung fiercely inside the cheap sneakers. She saw a heavy peacoat on a hook, and some rubber boots, but left them where they were. She was better off with unrestricted movement and silent steps, at least indoors.

  She crossed to a doorway and pushed on the door, which was ajar; it croaked, so she lifted up on the knob to reduce the weight on the hinges and it swung open silently. She listened.

  Someone was definitely here with her in the church, making a regular hissing sound. Sweeping, she thought, or mopping. Danny dipped low through the doorway into a second room utterly dark except for a pale square of doorway in the right-hand wall that let into the public part of the church. She crossed the room one careful, sliding step at a time, ready to stop if she met anything that could knock over in the darkness.

  Now she could see into the main space of the church, the thorax or whatever it was called; she hadn’t gotten much religious training. There were big stained-glass windows all around, and the floodlights outside cast gaunt rags of color across pews and aisles. The place was full of folding chairs, as well; hardly any floor space was left bare. There was a balcony across the opposite end of the church with organ pipes at the back and the vaulted ceiling above. The main doors were beneath the balcony and presumably led directly outside.

  A man in a hood was indeed sweeping his way down the center aisle with a wide push broom. Danny glanced around her end of the space: She could see the back of an altar and a raised platform beneath it, and against the wall up above her to the left, centered on the gable end, was a gory, life-sized crucifixion, Christ’s arms outstretched, head sagging on his chest. She hadn’t been in churches very often, and couldn’t guess if this was a Catholic, Protestant, or other kind of operation. She associated such places with funerals, and they made her nervous.

  This one made her more nervous.

  She determined to slip back into the mudroom, grab the boots and peacoat, and make her way back to the hospital, rather than risk being discovered; this wasn’t getting her any closer to locating the Silent Kid. She’d seen from the incident outside that the downtown area was more or less impassable.

  As she started to move back through the doorway, a voice barked, “Who goes there?”

  It echoed around the big, hollow space. Danny crouched low to the ground, scalpel ready to strike. She expected the lights to come on, but it remained dark. The m
an in the hood, however, seemed to know exactly where she was. He rushed directly at her with the broom in both hands. He made no outcry, to Danny’s surprise; the only sound was the whack of his boots on the tile floor. Danny waited in the doorway taut as a snare while he closed the distance; as the man swung the broom-head like a sledgehammer, she jerked back, the broom striking the door frame, and the handle broke in half. Unfortunately the hooded man didn’t lose his grip, so he was now holding what amounted to a four-foot spear. He was about a head taller than Danny, and his reach was a foot or more longer than hers.

  He thrust the jagged length of wood at Danny, grunting with the effort; she twisted past the thrust and grabbed the broom handle with the thumb and palm of her mutilated hand, pulling it past her in a single motion. The man overbalanced and tumbled into the dark room, knocking things over. It sounded like cartons of books. Danny ducked out through the doorway and danced backward into the big church space like a boxer. She didn’t want to fight in a pitch-black, confined area. A couple of seconds later, the man came surging out of the room and Danny understood why he’d been able to locate her so quickly—his hood had fallen back, revealing night vision goggles.

  The man launched an all-out assault now, whipping the broom handle back and forth like a sword with one hand; he clipped her on the elbow with it and it hurt like fury, but didn’t disable her arm. Then she saw him draw something from his belt and heard the pinging power-up sound of a Taser. If it was a pistol-style unit she was in trouble. She decided not to wait to find out.