Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  When she couldn’t stand to wait any longer, she forced herself to hold out for another half-hour. Then she stole out of the shed, oozing from shadow to shadow, still refusing to act upon the urgency that was trying to burst out of her. Everybody in town was on alert. This was going to take absolute caution.

  After crossing through several yards and traversing the main street between searchlight sweeps, Danny reached the shadow of one of the buildings behind the church. She had decided, during the long wait in the shed, to attack the Risen Flesh first. The Architect commanded too many guns; she’d never make it out of the bank alive. So the church had to be first.

  The door through which she had first entered the building was ten meters away. She thought it was probably locked, these days. But the Victorian hardware wouldn’t stand up to much abuse. The Preacher and acolytes lived elsewhere, maybe in the very house she was hiding behind right now. Once she was inside, there would probably be at least two acolytes on guard, however. Maybe the entire contingent. She’d made her present task harder when she destroyed the first of them.

  But her mission didn’t require finesse. She had a dozen baseball-style hand grenades, some NATO and some U.S. Army. She thought two of them would take care of business. One to take down whichever guards were in there, and the second more or less shoved up the Risen Flesh’s asshole. That was phase one of her plan. Phase two involved the bank across the street.

  She took several deep breaths to get oxygen into her tissues and stuffed four grenades into her jacket pockets. Then she shrugged into the backpack—it was heavy and cumbersome, but she couldn’t afford to end up parted from it again. She even latched the chest straps around herself. If a stray bullet hit the pack or it caught fire or any of myriad other mishaps, she would be feeling no pain. Then she slipped the gloves from her hands. Absolute dexterity was required, and she was already at a disadvantage there. In ten seconds she was going to kick the door down.

  “One,” she whispered. “Two.”

  On three, the church exploded.

  17

  Danny was thrown off her feet.

  The stained-glass windows all lit up at once, then turned into a million glittering butterflies, and then they were gone in a blast of smoke and debris. The entire structure of the church seemed to leap into the air. Its walls bowed outward and clapboards burst apart and flew whickering over Danny’s head. With a great and mournful note, the bell in the church tower broke free of its moorings and sang its way through the air, then smote the Civil War statue, shearing the head off the bronze soldier and clanging to the ground. Thick mats of smoke belched out of the gaping windows and turned the now-crooked tower into a chimney.

  Danny’s ears were ringing and the backpack stuck jagged fingers into the coarse flesh of her back. She was covered with debris and bright fragments of colored glass. There were voices now, distant shouts and cries. A siren wound up to full voice and the spotlights wheeled around, glowing through the smoke. For the better part of a minute, she couldn’t get up. Danny’s head was blazing with pain again. She’d been told to avoid this kind of thing. Then self-preservation took over and she scrambled back away from the church, along the side of the house that had mostly sheltered her from the explosion. A storm door was flung open just in front of her; it led out onto a raised porch with three steps. Danny dived under the porch, jamming herself into the cobwebs and dead leaves underneath it as heavy footfalls banged on the boards overhead.

  She’d been right: One acolyte came down the porch steps and ran for the church. They must be quartered in the house. She waited, although the cramped space was suffocating her. Where were the others? Had they come out the front door? After another half-minute she was rewarded by more cautious steps coming out onto the porch. She saw the Preacher’s cowboy boots on the stairs, then watched as he walked down the side of the house. He stood a long while surveying the destruction of the church—the smoke was already clearing, and it appeared the place wasn’t on fire. He stood there immobile, a crow-black shape framed by the ruination of his little empire. Then he spat on the ground next to his left toe and walked rapidly back the way he had come. He didn’t go back inside the house. He just kept on walking. Somehow, Danny didn’t think anybody would ever see him again.

  She emerged from her hiding place and brushed herself off as best she could, then circled around the house so she could emerge at a distance from the action. The central square of town was pandemonium. Hundreds of people were spilling out of houses and businesses all up and down the streets, rushing to see what had happened. Some were wailing with terror, others whooping with excitement. Most were simply shouting, confused and alarmed. The guns on the rooftops were silent. They couldn’t shoot this situation down.

  “What happened?” Danny asked a woman running past in nightgown and ski parka.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, and kept on going.

  So Danny joined the throng, and nobody seemed to take note that she was fully dressed, filthy, and wearing a heavy military-style pack on her back. The church was still standing, but it was an empty shell now. The doors had been blown off and the interior, while dark, was revealed in glimpses by the spotlights that roamed over the window holes. A great wreckage of pews and folding chairs was scattered across the floor. Lengths of broken timber spilled out of the window frames. Where the Risen Flesh had once hung, now there was only the upright post; she thought she saw a single foot, upside-down, still hanging from one of the holy nails.

  Danny turned her attention to the bank, which the crowd was entirely ignoring in all the excitement across the street. The Architect was outside on his balcony, Cad on his right, Nancy on his left, with a dozen fully armed guards on the downstairs porch beneath their feet. But all of the interior lights were off. They didn’t want anyone to notice them. None of the unliving saw her, as far as Danny could tell. But she now understood the game.

  The Architect had set her up. He didn’t know exactly when Danny would strike, or even if she would do so at all. But he knew she would be somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, and his minions could kill or capture her and that would be that. She was the scapegoat. Capture the terrorist, probably execute her, and he would win the sympathies not only of his own followers, but of the churchgoers who had lost their rotting god.

  She’d seen it coming, of course. But she hadn’t expected anything quite this spectacular.

  She needed to get the hell out of there.

  • • •

  As Danny retreated through the backyard shadows of the suburbs, aiming vaguely for the school-hospital that was her temporary home, she saw gangs of men running down the streets, waving flashlights and guns around. She saw bewildered civilians beaten to the ground, mostly women. She had a feeling the setup theory was correct. A group of people were herded out of their house and forced to lie on the icy pavement in their underwear, guns pressed against their necks. Danny remembered there had been something like this in Nazi Germany, the Night of the Broken Glass. A witch hunt. If they found her, she wasn’t going to make it as far as the show trial.

  The hospital looked like a beehive stirred with a stick. There were guards patrolling the grounds and the streets around it. She wasn’t going back there. Danny caught a glimpse of the medical staff being marched down the front steps; Dr. Joe Higashiyama had his hands laced together behind his head like the others. She wondered if they would kill him just for being her doctor. She wondered how many patients they would lose because the staff wasn’t able to attend to them. Then she kept on moving. She needed to get through the perimeter fence.

  • • •

  The gates that controlled access to and from Happy Town stood open. There was a guard on the ground, facedown, and in the little guard shack where Danny had seen the stove and cots there was another guard lying faceup, his throat cut. She looked up the long axis of the main street and in the distance there were searchlights and smoke and noise, but here it was eerily silent. It could be a trap, but she decide
d to find out the easy way. Danny crawled out of the bushes of the last house beside the fence and walked up to the road. She paused. No voices rang out to challenge her. She approached the gates, which stood slightly ajar. Still there came no warning, no shots, no sudden glare of searchlights.

  She stood in the opening, irresolute. Should she flee into the badlands and rejoin her companions at the abandoned house? Should she pay the Architect a personal visit by some devious route through town? Her ability to develop a plan seemed to have deserted her. Now her head was throbbing with pain, as well. If she had another of her blackouts, she wasn’t going to find out how this thing ended.

  She looked back into town and saw it was snowing again. Starting to come down hard, in fact. There was some gunfire and tiny screams reached her ears. The moaning of the wind was a sad commentary on the state of humanity. She watched the fat snowflakes spiral down, already dusting the road from black to gray.

  Then Danny realized there was something impossible about the scene. She analyzed the feeling, because it was important somehow. She took each factor one at a time: the attack on the church, clearly coordinated by the Architect. The search for women. That much she understood. Then there were the open gates and slain guards. Something was wrong. She listened to the faraway noise of the mob, the howling wind, and watched the snow falling.

  Then she understood.

  The snow was falling straight down. But the wind was moaning, getting louder.

  There was no wind.

  Danny turned back to face the badlands, and saw the swarm approaching.

  18

  Adrenaline hit her veins like somebody was packing her entire body with ice. The area lights around the gate were nothing special, just outdoor fixtures of the type people put up over their garage doors. Several of them were motion-activated. Now they began to click on, casting light on the foremost of the undead.

  Security around the gates had always been nominal, just for show; the real security was out in the badlands. Danny understood now where the acolytes had gone. They were out there in the wastes, breaking the thin line of defense. Now the moaners and hunters were on their way to the biggest human buffet this side of North America.

  Danny shoved the gates closed. The locks had been cut open with bolt cutters, which lay on the pavement beside the nearest dead guard. Danny slung the broken chain around the frame of the two gates and jammed the cutters through the chain like a kind of steel clothespin. It would hold for a couple of minutes, no more. The entire road was filled with the undead, and their moans now drowned out the noise from downtown. As far as Danny’s eyes could see, extending out into the darkness on either side, there were thousands of zombies, rotten and damaged and hungry, many of them grotesquely diseased with knobs and filaments and warts bursting through their putrid skin. She could already smell them with fifty meters to spare.

  Danny knelt beside the corpse of the guard. He had a walkie-talkie on his belt. She had to make a decision. Call in the situation and risk capture or summary execution, or let things happen as they would, resulting in the destruction of every living soul in town. It wasn’t a fair choice.

  “Come in, somebody,” she said. “I’m at the town gates.”

  “Who is this?” a male voice barked in response, fuzzy with static.

  “This is the sheriff,” she said. “You’re looking for me. But you have a bigger problem. I’d deploy your entire force, right now, with everything you’ve got, to these gates. You have about ten thousand zeroes coming up the road.”

  She dropped the radio on the ground. Snow immediately began to accumulate on it. It was going to be a serious storm.

  The first of the zeroes reached the fence, a small male she took for a child at first, but it was an adult. It hissed at her, fingers hooked through the mesh of the fence. Another joined it, and then another, and she saw the wire bulge and ripple as they threw themselves at the barrier, driven by hunger. Already the headlights of one of the security vans were bouncing down the road—they had taken her warning seriously. Or they wanted to capture her while she was still there. She was sure they wouldn’t worry about her any longer once they saw what was coming.

  But still, she ran alongside the fence and into the undergrowth. There was no point in getting shot along with the zeroes. No matter how far she ran, the undead were crashing into the fence. A pack of hunters, wizened and lean, were already halfway up the fence, the uppermost one of them tangled in the barbed wire at the top. It caught at the electrified strand and a spit of blue sparks followed it to the ground. The others snarled and snapped their jaws at Danny as she fleeted past.

  She realized with a heavy certainty that whatever defense was to be made of Happy Town, she was going to be a part of it. The Silent Kid might be behind several near-impregnable barriers, but near wasn’t good enough. The sheer weight of the undead would take down every obstacle. She was going to have to defend the children until the flesh was torn from her bones.

  • • •

  The return through Happy Town was easy. Everyone with a firearm was heading toward the gates as further reports of the swarm began to spread. Danny simply kept to the side streets and made the distance unopposed as far as the central intersection in town. There she paused only to see what was happening; the Architect and his immediate staff were nowhere to be seen, but the lights were on inside the bank. Panic had gripped the chooks as word got around. Most of the civilians, as had been Danny’s experience throughout the crisis, fled at the first sign of trouble. So the streets were emptying out. Danny could not imagine how they thought a man-eating horde of the undead could be stopped by hiding under their beds. She spared a moment to think of her old friends. Patrick, Amy, Maria, so many others trapped in this shithole. She hadn’t seen some of them in a while. Maybe at least Patrick and Amy were out there in the world already, far from the swarm. But there were other swarms. Other places like Happy Town trading the illusion of safety for the certainty of imprisonment.

  Good fucking luck, Danny thought. That was as close to a prayer as she could manage.

  Then she broke cover and sprinted up the street, heading straight for the fortified train station.

  19

  The guards had not left their posts. Danny was moving in the opposite direction of the tide—most people were fleeing into the suburbs or heading to the defense of the barrier. Word hadn’t spread far enough so that there was a mob at the station, but there would be, soon. It was going to make the evacuation of Saigon look like a bus queue.

  She was counting on these guards not being a part of the teams that had been looking for her earlier; if she was proven wrong, she’d shoot them where they stood. She let her hand rest on her hip, casual to look at but only inches from the gun in her waistband.

  “They need you at the perimeter fence,” Danny said to the foremost of the guards. There was snow settling on his shoulders.

  “My orders—”

  “There hasn’t been time for new orders,” Danny barked. “You got thousands of zeroes at the wire right the fuck now, soldier! Do you hear them?”

  The uncanny sound of the swarm reached all the way to the mountain. She saw recognition and disbelief in his face. The guard looked to his fellows on the other side of the first, lowest barrier to the station. They didn’t give him any clues.

  “I’ll go see,” he said, and trotted down the street.

  Danny wasted no time. The rest of the guards wouldn’t be so easy. There were six men at the second barrier, and she couldn’t see how many beyond that. They had fully automatic weapons and they were nervous. Danny didn’t have any authority here, and they could even discover she’d been the enemy a few minutes earlier.

  “We need to mount a solid defense,” she said, her voice hard and loud, in order-delivering mode. “You’re going to have every civilian in town trying to get on this train within ten minutes, when those gates go down. I’m talking about ten fucking battalions of the ugliest zeroes you have ever seen, and th
ey are hungry. Moaners and hunters. There are two things going to keep them from overrunning this town. Firepower and thinkers. There are thinkers here, but not enough. Do you understand me?”

  Several of the men nodded; one even said, “Yes, ma’am.” But none of them moved. She had to feed them every damn thing, apparently. Already there was screaming from the far end of town, muffled by the heavy snowfall, but still unmistakable. Raw terror. The zeroes must have gotten through.

  “You hear that? I want every one of you to take up a defensive position above arm’s reach, you copy? Get up out of reach. Bring all the ammo, food, and water you can get your hands on, because that may be all you ever fucking get. We are going to mount a defense of this station. There are two enemies: panicked civilians and zeroes. You want the civilians on this side of the third fence, no matter what, because if they overrun the train, the children die. Are we clear?”

  Nobody spoke. They were probably still trying to decide whether to shoot her.

  “Are we clear?”

  There was an explosion off in the distance. The snow falling from the sky lit up. That did the trick. The men scrambled from their positions, running to collect their gear. Danny only hoped they weren’t running away entirely. She wanted one of those rifles.

  • • •

  She knew it was the perfect storm. Panic spreads asymmetrically. It’s driven by what people can see and hear, not by information. People would freeze if they heard something like marching feet or engines approaching, losing precious seconds while they listened to determine which way the sound was traveling and ascertain what made it. They would run immediately if they saw something happen, always directly away from the thing they feared. People who hadn’t seen or heard would often run in the direction of danger, to witness it for themselves. Others would join the panic and run, but in a random direction because they didn’t know the source of the threat.