Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  The two kids made Danny think of Kelley. She needed to start talking, or she might lose it.

  “You all must be pretty tired and some of you may have injuries, but we’re in a difficult position. I know I’d like to get to a land line and find out if some folks made it through all this okay. And I’m guessing there are people thinking the same thing about you. Anybody made phone contact since last night? Email?”

  People were shaking their heads.

  “Lost contact with everybody not long after things went bad,” a man said.

  Kelley came into Danny’s mind again; she dismissed the image, and continued, “So we don’t have any way to find out what’s in front of us. And we got a kind of a big problem. See that cloud back there on the western horizon?”

  Danny pointed off past the foothills, beyond which a dark thunderhead rose up. Its leading edge was touched with salmon highlights from the sunrise, but its depths were black as tar. People looked at it, then back at her.

  “It doesn’t rain out here from June to October. That’s smoke. That’s Los Angeles.”

  A woman turned away, and a man put his arm around her. Everybody started talking. Danny cleared her throat again and tried to run her hand through her hair. But there was some kind of lumpy, gnarled stuff all over her head. She dragged some off with her fingers and looked at it. Burnt hair. No wonder they were staring at her. She must have looked worse than most of the zombies. This was one of the very rare occasions when Danny felt the need to look in a mirror.

  “I guess I’m not looking my best,” Danny said, and a couple of people laughed out loud. Good. Keep moving while there was a little sympathy. “Anyway, we better not go back toward the highly settled areas. We have to keep moving up along the edge of the desert.”

  Now they were talking over her, stirred up like hornets. Consternation, objection, alarm. Danny waved it all away.

  “Listen. Listen! Maria there was on the emergency bands for hours yesterday. That’s the only communications system still online.” Danny hesitated. Was it only yesterday? “She talked to law enforcement and emergency personnel all over the Southland. They were swamped. I mean they were knocked out of commission before those things even got back up. If anybody here thinks they can just drive on home, you need to face a hard reality.”

  Maria raised her hand.

  “I think I lost everybody,” she said.

  Now the survivors were looking ill and miserable. Better to get this over with, have everybody fall apart at once. It would help consolidate their need for leadership, as well, which would relieve Danny of the need to engage in any pissing matches with the more macho types.

  “I’m going to tell you why else we’re not going back to Los Angeles,” Danny continued, “and why we’re not necessarily going to San Diego or any of the other big cities around here, not for a while. There were ten million people in Los Angeles County, two days ago. Whatever killed all these people in Forest Peak, from what I heard yesterday, it spread out from a center not too far from downtown L.A. I looked at the big map in the station and figured out there’s a circle you could draw all the way around the city that hits Forest Peak to the east, maybe as far as Banning, then all the way to the ocean on the west, and as far south as Temecula. To the north I don’t know if it made it over the mountains, but if it did, you’re talking about Lancaster and Apple Valley. I don’t know this for a fact, but it works on the map.”

  Not everybody could conjure up the map of Southern California the way Danny could, but she saw the truth dawning on some of the faces. The mountains made a natural firewall against the spread of the death-dealing agent northward, but there was nothing stopping it—or the hordes of starving, ambulatory corpses—in any other direction. Only the ocean, and that stopped the living, as well. Already Danny could see questions surfacing on a couple of faces. She needed to keep talking while the momentum was hers, although her throat felt like it had been scrubbed with bleach and a wire brush.

  “So what we have is huge concentrations that are too dangerous for us to go into. If there’s some kind of federal effort to deal with this, we’ll hook up with that as soon as possible. Until then, I want to keep us moving northward where there are fewer people, probably less contagion, if that’s what it is, and ideally we’ll regroup with other survivors there. Ten more minutes, then let’s pull out. We can make Scobie Tree in a couple hours. Don’t wander off. We don’t know what’s out there.”

  There was more discussion than Danny liked, after she was done speaking. In the service it was considered insubordinate to openly discuss an officer’s judgment. These civilians didn’t try to hide their skepticism. They were expecting a vote or something, Danny thought. Fuck ’em, they could vote in November. She had to keep them moving.

  Amy was standing there at the back as the huddle broke up, watching Danny with narrowed eyes. Amy was thinking about something, and her expression said it was something to do with Danny’s remarks. Amy was always too smart for her own good.

  “Keys,” Danny said.

  Amy shook her head. “You get washed up, have a look at yourself in the mirror, and come back to me for some medical attention. I got the stuff from the station, so we should be able to fix up some of the less serious damage. But you really need to look at yourself. I’ll do the driving.”

  It was a long way to the toilets. Danny felt like she was walking on rubber stilts.

  She stared into the steel mirror bolted over the sink of the women’s room. Someone had scratched a looping graffito into the reflective surface with a key, and someone else had tried to buff it out with sandpaper, but she could still see plenty enough of her reflection. Her hair was the first thing. She had clearly been facing the blast she couldn’t remember, because her hair, especially on top, was roasted into a chunky, dreadlocklike mass. She had less than two inches of hair left in front, from crown to ears. The hair that had survived in back was largely plastered down with layers of dried blood. The face below the hair was so filthy that her bloodshot eyes stood out like a cartoon character blinking in the dark. With the red around them, her irises stood out electric green. But not for long: The left eye was swelling shut.

  Her face was covered in zombie and human blood. There were cuts and scrapes and heat blisters all over her exposed skin, her lips had split open in three places, and one of her ears looked like the object of a rat attack. If the zombie infection got in through fresh injuries, she was in serious trouble. But she was still alive, so maybe instead of incubating it, she was immune, or the heat of the fires killed it. Or maybe she was just lucky, if this was what qualified as luck. Maybe it wasn’t an infectious disease at all.

  She splashed water on her skin and it stung furiously, but she kept splashing and scrubbing, black and red droplets staining the white sink for five minutes before she had gotten herself mostly cleaned off, at least the front of her face and neck. What was going on in the back of her head didn’t bear thinking about. Then she more gently cleaned off her arms up to the elbows. They were too sore to scrub, and large areas of skin began to peel away. She didn’t use any soap. It seemed like it would hurt too much. Danny decided to let her skin air dry, hawked and spat, and trudged out the door to face the world again.

  When she emerged into the brilliant light of a new morning, the survivors were standing near their respective vehicles, but everyone was facing her way. Somebody started clapping, and then the rest followed, some shouting thanks, even a couple of whistles. Maria ran her hand down Danny’s upper arm, beaming at her.

  Danny walked back to the interceptor without acknowledging the applause. She suspected Amy had a hand in this embarrassing display. And one thing Danny knew for sure: These people wouldn’t be pleased with her for very long.

  2

  They reached Scobie Tree after three more hours of driving. Amy drove the interceptor at the front of the pack, and Danny dozed beside her. It was a hot day and the thick black cloud over Los Angeles was visible on the horizon, risi
ng into the stratosphere, borne up on volcanic heat. There were other fires, not so far away. Probably in places like Riverside and San Bernardino.

  With her first waking thought, Danny wondered what downtown L.A. would be like. There were living people there. No matter how bad things got, people always survived. And they suffered. What was happening in the city must be biblical. Sodom and Gomorrah, if she remembered her Good Book. Huge buildings devoured by coiling dragons of fire that sprang three hundred feet in the air. There would be sheets of white flame sucking the oxygen out of the streets, turning the little hiding places where people curled up into vacuums as airless and deadly as outer space. Underground gas lines would explode, turning streets into canyons of fire. Windows would melt and run down the sidewalks and the vehicles and mailboxes and trees and corpses would become stumpy, brittle skeletons.

  But the flames would cook those flesh-eating zombie sons of bitches, too. The more of them that were consumed by the fire, the fewer of them would have to be taken down. Burn the fucking city to the ground, if it destroyed a few hundred thousand of those things. But don’t let Kelley be there. Pray she went the way I think she did, if she’s still alive.

  “What,” Amy said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You growled.”

  “I didn’t.” But Danny knew she had. The guys in Iraq used to imitate her doing it.

  She realized her bandaged left hand had stolen up to the tattered breast pocket of her uniform shirt, and she was touching Kelley’s note, folded within. She couldn’t bring herself to read it, and yet she wanted to follow where Kelley might have gone. She knew Kelley well enough—or rather, Kelley knew her big sister well enough—to know she wouldn’t tell Danny where she was going, not if she took the Mustang.

  Danny didn’t know what to think about Kelley. If her sister was one of those things now, did Danny wish her happy hunting? Or would she want to be the one who put a bullet through her head? The only thing Danny was sure of was that she had to know. She couldn’t go through however much life she had left without knowing what had happened to her sister.

  “It’s Kelley, right?”

  Danny stared at Amy, who was driving the interceptor with the AC blasting and her window down, elbow hooked over the sill. Her hair was whipping around against the acrylic divider panel behind their heads. This could have been one of their early road trips, after both girls had licenses and Danny got her first Mustang, a white 1981 piece of shit. This was almost relaxing. Against her better knowledge, Danny had decided to take her boots off. She knew she might not be able to get them back on, but this wasn’t the war and she wasn’t on patrol. Her toes almost screamed audibly upon release. She dragged off the damp drab green socks she’d been wearing since the night she passed out the night Kelley ran away and her feet smelled vinegary and there were blisters all around the edges. The air-conditioning felt heavenly on them. And here Amy was, reading Danny’s mind again.

  “Yeah, Kelley,” Danny said. “How did you—”

  “You’re crinkling the note in your pocket.”

  Danny let her hand fall away from her chest.

  “How do you know that I have Kelley’s note in my pocket?”

  “Duh. Because you wouldn’t get all wet-eyed if it was parking citations.”

  Danny swabbed at her eyes with the soft white bandage. She could still see with both of them. It looked like the shiner wasn’t going to swell all the way, which was good. She had a feeling this would be a bad time to lose the advantage of binocular vision.

  “Read it, will you?” Amy said. “Danny, why the heck don’t you just read it?” Amy slapped the steering wheel with her palm, which made the interceptor swerve out of the lane. Danny, irritated, looked back at the motor home rumbling along behind them. If she’d been driving that never would have happened. But she wasn’t irritated with Amy. It was herself. She had come up against an obstacle in her head, and she couldn’t understand it.

  “What if she’s dead?” Danny said.

  “Reading her running-away note won’t change that.”

  “Amy, for fuck’s sake, don’t make me say it.” Danny felt a blush rising up her face. It burned, flaming beneath the raw skin. But she had to confess. “I’m scared shitless to read this note. I’m scared of what’s in it.”

  Amy nodded. Then she said, brightly: “If Diggler survived, Kelley survived.”

  Danny felt a wave of despair pass through her, like ghosts. She needed the sane Amy with her now, not the queen of the non sequitur.

  “Ah, Jesus, Amy. What are you talking about?”

  “Diggler. He’s a pig, right? Kelley’s like ten times smarter than him.”

  “How is Diggler still alive?”

  The smile melted off Amy’s face and went all the way around the clock to misery.

  “How can you say that?”

  “Are we really having this conversation? Seriously, how do you know the pig’s alive.”

  “He just is.”

  “That’s irrational.”

  “So is driving in this direction. You can’t fool me, Danny. I know what’s up. You want to catch Kelley.”

  Danny made a noise of contempt and looked out the side window. “Don’t be stupid. Less danger this way. Simple as that.” Amy was nuts. Completely crazy.

  Crazy like a fox.

  Danny was silent after that, until the convoy pulled into Scobie Tree.

  The town of Scobie Tree had dried up and blown away in 1958, when the military traffic along the roads into the desert settled down from the Cold War high. The place was never impressive: It had been a stagecoach stop 150 years earlier, then a silver mine opened up and kept a few hundred souls occupied for thirty or forty years until the automobile came along. A handful of folks stuck around to pump gas and change tires after the silver ran out; they made it as far as the Second World War, and prospered again briefly, then drifted away.

  Now Scobie Tree consisted of a bunch of outbuildings (they always seemed to outlast the structures they were built to serve), an old brick hotel (then rooming house, and finally a good place to store whatever was scavenged from the abandoned buildings around it), a gas station, and a general store. There was a plaque bolted up on the gas station wall. A couple of scenes from the Robert Mitchum movie Out of the Past had been filmed there, according to the plaque.

  Scobie Tree had one important thing going for it. About a mile outside the three-building town, there was a freeway interchange: The tail end of Route 114 met the 12A, and the 12A could take you to other, bigger roads anywhere you wanted to go—west to the high desert communities, northwest all the way to San Francisco, northeast past the Mojave to Las Vegas, or due east to Arizona.

  It was a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. An ideal place to keep away from the living dead and still have some traveling options.

  Danny was sure Kelley would have gone this way, because Kelley had privileged knowledge gleaned from her cop sister: There wasn’t a dedicated police force anywhere in the area. She could run that shiny red Mustang at 120 miles per hour and not see a cop all day, unless it was a highway patrolman—and Danny had a police radio in the Mustang’s glove box. Kelley would have known well ahead of time if there was a rogue Smokey in the desert.

  Danny was sure she was on the trail of her wayward sister. And although she hadn’t scraped up the courage to read the note, Amy had, and Amy didn’t say anything to contradict Danny’s thesis. Danny would read the note while they were stopped in Scobie Tree. She hoped she could handle it.

  Danny got on the radio and explained how they would approach settled areas from here onward. She was going to take a tour of the town in the interceptor, and if she spotted any survivors or undead she would note their position and a party could go out and take the appropriate action.

  Just outside town, Danny made Amy pull over and she hauled her boots on and got behind the wheel, body racked with stiffness. The two of them drove slowly up and down the grid of six s
hort streets that composed Scobie Tree. There were foundation holes and the outlines of footings where buildings had been, and piles of paper-dry clapboards and framing wood where the structures had collapsed. A lot of hiding places if a zombie was prone. Danny remembered seeing some of them lie down in Forest Peak, although she didn’t know if that was commonplace. They might have died for good. In any case, nothing stirred. The town was empty.

  As they made the circuit back to Central Avenue (Scobie’s brief claim to 114), Danny saw the motor home was no longer parked outside town. It was up at the gas station, and there were people swarming around.

  “Ah shit,” she said, and accelerated.

  They were looting. No other word for it.

  Troy was standing by the gas pumps, filling the motor home’s immense tanks with diesel. The electric pumps were still getting power. He had his arms folded in an embarrassed posture as Danny pulled up. She popped the bubblegum lights on, and the survivors climbing in and out of the now-shattered front window of the general store dropped their swag and tried to look innocent. Danny was out of the car before the engine died.

  “What the hell are you people doing?” she asked the nearest survivor. He was a midforties man, not tall.

  He didn’t answer her question, but spoke to someone in the crowd: “Shoemaker,” he said, “tell her.”

  “I’m asking you,” Danny said.

  The one called Shoemaker stepped forward. “Let me handle this, Gluck,” he said.

  Like this is a fucking traffic ticket, Danny thought, and felt a spike of rage drive itself into her temple.

  Shoemaker had an alert, serious face and made phony eye contact, looking very slightly not into Danny’s eyes. Hawaiian shirt with a muted pattern, the only thing worse than a Hawaiian shirt with a loud pattern. Probably a divorce lawyer, Danny estimated. He was one of the men Danny had identified as troublemakers back at the rest area. He spoke in a low, confidential voice.

  “Officer,” he began.

  “Sheriff.”