Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  Topper and Wulf and the weasel-man Ernie were sleeping on top of the motor home. Or rather, the bikers were sleeping. Danny suspected the old derelict was probably as awake as she was, although lying down with the Winchester rifle cradled against his cheek. Troy was inside the motor home, the only person in the group who was close to the ground. But he had agreed to stay there in case something happened. If there was a situation, the driver of the huge machine should be able to take the wheel within moments. Anyway, he was safe enough, fairly high off the ground and surrounded by metal. There was no moon, but this far from mankind (or the remains of mankind, the voice reminded Danny), there wasn’t any light clouding the sky, or smog or smoke. The stars made it down to the horizon, only blurring to the south—where, presumably, Los Angeles still burned.

  The gunshot had come from the left. Danny took her eyes off the woman in black. The woman with an explosive device in her hands. In the farmhouse, at the front window, Danny saw the sand-scoured muzzle of an automatic weapon. She fired two rounds from the shotgun without an instant’s thought, and the rifle jerked back into the house.

  Danny whipped the shotgun around at the woman, only to see her falling. The black robes, the veil, were of much lighter-weight stuff than they appeared. They caught the thick, hot air as the woman fell, billowing up around her. The satchel mine tumbled from her fingers.

  An instant later, a tank gun banged, and the farmhouse seemed to jump three feet sideways. Dust and smoke billowed out of the window in which Danny had seen the gun—

  Danny awoke when she heard a squeaking sound. It was very late; she hadn’t known she was falling asleep. She looked around and saw the ladder had been lowered over the side of the building. She moved carefully to the parapet and looked down. Below, in the street, Ted and a couple of others were rolling a car away from the store. Danny knew it was Ted because he wasn’t on the roof anymore. Another person joined them down there, having completed the trip down the ladder. Danny looked over and saw Wulf was also awake, watching. He saw her looking at him and made an open-hands gesture: Now what?

  Danny gave a dismissive flip of the wrist and settled back to watch the escapees roll the car away. They started it up outside town, but didn’t put the lights on until they were well down the road. Danny supposed Ted was laughing at her, exhilarated to have outwitted such a formidable opponent as herself. When he was dying beneath the throat-shredding jaws of a ravenous corpse, maybe he would remember her, Danny thought, sourly.

  She didn’t feel like she was going to get back to sleep. Wulf was now sitting and smoking over there atop the RV. She hadn’t known he was a smoker.

  She opened her shirt pocket and took out Kelley’s note. Threw some twigs on the barbecue. Then she hunkered down in the dim, red firelight, and read her sister’s words, and when she was done reading them through for the second time, she wept silent and bitter tears until dawn.

  4

  It was time to get their shit wired down tight.

  The following morning brought another bright, cloudless day. Three zombies were wandering the street at first light. Danny noticed Wulf waited for a while, probably so the people on the roof could catch a little more sleep, before he shot the zombies down. Several people didn’t wake up even then.

  Ted, Gluck, and the guy with the goatee had fled in the night, and a couple of others that Danny could only vaguely picture. She’d been too busy so far to become familiar with all of the faces around her, but she knew they’d be well-known within a day or two. And now there weren’t so many of them.

  The unexpected thing was that they hadn’t picked up any stragglers while they were leaving the mountains of home; Danny had expected roads lined with hitchhikers and lost vehicles, but their way had been mostly deserted. If this was Kelley’s route, it was a brilliant choice. Nobody knew it existed. They could make good progress on the journey ahead.

  Before they pulled out, Danny arranged a foraging party, with orders to take only what they needed, and only part of what they found. She got everybody doing something. And she knew the reason she was keeping them busy: to keep herself busy. To take her mind off Kelley’s note, which had slashed her soul open to the bone.

  •

  There was a whirling trail of dust behind the interceptor as it raced up the road out of Agua Rojo. Up ahead on the main road the RV was parked, less than a mile distant, with its tail of smaller vehicles strung out along the shoulder.

  Agua Rojo was a fair-sized town, and Danny had told everyone to stay put while she “scouted for survivors.” She didn’t mention she was also looking for a red vintage Mustang. She’d seen a Mustang there, but it was the wrong color. There had been hundreds of bodies lying in the street when she arrived; Danny assumed they were ordinary corpses.

  Danny looked back and saw the first of the zombies reach the pavement behind her, crawling out of their hiding places along the road. It would take them ten minutes to get within range of the survivors.

  Danny raced up to the intersection, where several of her companions were standing around in a knot. She threw on the brakes and the interceptor rose up on its shocks. There was a zombie on the ground right beside the RV, with a fantail of black brains a few feet away. It must have been Wulf who shot it, based on the direction of the spatter. The grimy rifleman was at his post on the roof of the motor home, shading his eyes to look down the road Danny had come up. He raised the rifle and sighted down the scope. And whistled.

  “You sure as fuck got some attention, Sheriff!” he hollered. Danny ignored him, sprinting from the interceptor to where Michelle lay on the ground, sobbing and gripping her elbow, blue hair hiding her face. Amy was bent over the girl, and Jimmy James was kneeling beside her, clutching his sister. There was a collection of frightened faces in each of the motor home’s windows, looking down.

  “Danny,” Amy said, coolly. “Glad you could make it. Some zombies showed up while you were doing your thing.”

  “We need to get out of here. Did she get bit?”

  “No, she fell on a rock. But it was this close, Danny.”

  Amy snapped her fingers under Danny’s nose. Topper came storming around the RV, a claw hammer in his fist. “I found another one back over there and busted its head,” he said. “Hey, look who’s fuckin’ back.”

  “We can talk later,” Danny said. “There’s a swarm coming.”

  “Wulf caught that one coming up out of the ditch,” Topper continued, ignoring the urgency in Danny’s voice. “It came after the blue kid there when she was trying to take a piss in the bushes.”

  “But don’t leave us hanging again,” Amy said, her voice low. “No matter how good you think your reason is.”

  So Amy hadn’t told the others about Kelley. Thank God for that. It gave Danny the boost she needed to get back into leadership mode.

  “We need to get out of this area,” Danny said. “Lot of them coming up the road. But here’s what happened. Those things, those zombies, they go dormant. You follow me? They go to sleep and wait. They just lie there until something comes along, and then they get up and move, okay? So no dead body is a dead body until there’s a big goddamn hole in its head, do you understand? When I drove into town they were all dead bodies. When I drove out, it looked like a goddamn Halloween party. Hundreds of ’em.”

  She looked around at the faces inside and outside the vehicles, taking everybody in. They needed to absorb this lesson or people were going to die.

  Wulf called down from above: “They’re coming closer, Sheriff.”

  Danny ignored him. They had another couple of minutes.

  Amy had Michelle on her feet. Patrick emerged from the motor home and guided the girl toward the steps. Her brother offered his shoulder to lean on. Between the bruises on her knees and the one she would soon have on her elbow, Michelle’s hair wasn’t her only blue feature anymore.

  Danny pointed at the headshot zombie lying between her and the interceptor. “They could be anywhere. So here’s the deal. T
he time of being private is over. I don’t care if you need to take a ten-pound crap, you bring somebody with you. From now on, nobody goes anywhere alone.”

  “Except you,” Topper noted. “You get to do whatever you want.”

  Danny got up close to him, fuming with annoyance. She needed everybody to get with the program, not change the subject. She had been scrupulous about avoiding any mention of Kelley until now, but Topper’s accusation had lit her fuse.

  She simply forgot herself.

  “I’m looking for my fucking sister!” she shouted—and instantly regretted it.

  Topper’s pockmarked face registered surprise, then anger. He swung around and punched the side of the motor home with enough force to dimple the sheet metal. But he spoke carefully, without raising his voice: “Dammit, Sheriff, we all lost somebody. You want rules, here’s one for you: None of this vigilante crap; we’re all in this together.”

  He paused and looked up at the faces in the windows, the faces waiting to get the hell out of there. They could all see the swarm of zombies coming up the road now. People were pointing. Topper wasn’t finished: “This country was built on the vote, let’s have a vote.”

  Amy walked over to Topper. She raised her hand.

  “I vote we go straight to the nearest military base. They can’t shoot us—we’re Americans.”

  Danny was boiling with shame and anger and defiance all at once. They didn’t need a vote. She’d lost herself, so she’d lost control of the situation. They knew she had other plans. There was nothing for it—she would have to pretend she’d seen the light.

  Maria shoved open one of the windows at the front of the motor home and pointed down the road at the horde of slow figures shambling toward them.

  “Can we go now?” she asked.

  They went.

  5

  The solid black smoke rose half a mile straight up into the afternoon sky, then blurred as if smudged by the stroke of a giant’s thumb. It had taken Danny, Wulf, and Topper the better part of an hour to reach their vantage point above the base, high up on a mountain ridge. It took them less than ten seconds to realize there wasn’t any refuge in Fort Irwin.

  “It’s on fire,” Danny said to the crowd gathered around her.

  “Our safe place is on fire?” Patrick said.

  “Burning like love,” Wulf said, and spat on the ground. Topper was the last one down the hill. “The ammo dump went up while we were watching,” he said. “Big old bang, that made.”

  “Maybe a bunch of Army guys will come to put it out,” Amy said, hopefully. Something clicked in Danny’s mind. She had an idea, but she needed a name.

  Danny rubbed her temples with both hands and felt hunks of brittle hair snap off. It was dawning on her that she’d been going about this all wrong. She was desperate to find that Mustang, because if she found the car, she might find Kelley. Might find her, like she might find a giant gorilla at the local Wal-Mart. But she’d been dragging along this heavy tail of malcontents and feebles, dealing with their getting upset if she walked away for ten minutes. The whole process had become so unwieldy that Kelley could be halfway across the country by now, and Danny hadn’t made it to the Nevada border.

  Kelley’s welfare was the dominant theme of Danny’s waking hours, driving her crazier than she’d been before. Danny felt the bitter rebuke of that farewell note every time her sister’s name came into her head. But there were little clues: Kelley wrote that she might decide to go to college, for example. Kelley was highly predictable, in Danny’s experience. And not adventurous. She hadn’t been many places. It didn’t sound like Kelley planned to go anywhere new, just somewhere away. That narrowed the field to half a dozen places, and the only big college town she’d ever seen outside the Los Angeles area was San Francisco.

  How much pain was inside that girl that Danny hadn’t seen. Danny had been so wrapped up in her own crap that she failed in the single most important task of her life. Now Kelley was out there, maybe alive, maybe reanimated, maybe bloating in the sun, tangled up in one of those wrecks down on the 15.

  What Danny needed to do was get these people to a safe place, as they had wanted all along. They were absolutely right—she needed to find a refuge like they wanted, with showers and beds and great big fences around it.

  And then she would have some options.

  “Amy, do you remember that helicopter demonstration?” Danny had changed the subject so fast, Amy was taken up short.

  “What?”

  “Before I went to Iraq. They brought that heavy lifter up over the mountains to demonstrate firefighting techniques.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “Remember where the chopper came from?”

  “The sky? I don’t know.”

  The name was flickering in the corner of her mind. She needed to check her map, but there was a real chance they could find refuge before nightfall. Danny pictured the massive helicopter with its bellyful of red firefighting dust, the white lettering on its tail, the insignia on the side, the name of its home base lettered across the cockpit door. She saw it in her memory.

  “Boscombe Field.”

  Danny rode alone again, her thoughts turning in gloomy circles around her mind. She had already been forced to refill her flask from the bottle concealed in the trunk of the interceptor. You couldn’t get a proper buzz on, in this kind of air. It wasn’t the heat, it was the dryness. They were traveling on the old 379 now, a short leg that took them into the heart of the baddest badlands in a bad countryside. Then it showed a little pity and returned to the shadow of a spine of mountains in the Panamint Range that eventually led to Telescope Peak, the highest point in Death Valley. The mountain was already visible in the distance, jutting up eleven thousand feet above their present location. The convoy rolled past several accident scenes: a tractor-trailer overturned against some rocks. A motorcycle with rider, tumbled in a strew of chrome fragments around a curve. The rider’s head was missing. Topper and Ernie stopped to see if it was anybody they knew.

  In a place less than two miles from their destination, between two sandstone steeps where the intensity of the reflected sunlight was so bright it wrung the eyes, there was a highway patrol car. It was a Chevy Impala, a 9C1 police package model Danny had never had the opportunity to drive. It was parked on the shoulder with its driver’s side door open. There was a green Buick Century a dozen yards in front of it. The Buick’s front door was also open, and its hood was up. Danny slowed to a crawl. The patrol car was empty. She radioed back for the motor home to stop for a minute while she checked the scene. A coyote slunk away through the boulders—she had started seeing them everywhere.

  Danny climbed out, shotgun in hand, and walked down the center of the road. Staying in the middle of the paved surface was a habit formed in Iraq, because improvised explosive devices were usually buried under the shoulders. But it was also an effective way to keep plenty of space between her and anything lurking among the rocks on either side. She found herself instinctually glancing at the ridgelines above her, looking for snipers, which was absurd. She was going to have to change her habits. Charlie don’t surf. Zombies don’t shoot.

  There was something huddled at the front of the Buick.

  Danny walked around the vehicle, giving it plenty of room. There was a cell phone lying on the ground, and beside it, turned upside-down, a dusty campaign hat, similar to the one Danny had lost. Hunched over the radiator was the highway patrolman. His body was swollen, already decaying. The back of his head had been smashed in with a rock; the rock still lay inside the engine compartment, lodged between the firewall and the plastic engine cover. There was blood spatter on the underside of the hood of the car. But whoever had killed this man hadn’t taken his vehicle, which was strange. What was the motive? Danny was at once enraged to discover such a vicious crime, and analyzing the circumstances for clues. She wanted to smash the perpetrator’s head with the same rock. She also wanted to know why it had happened at all.

&
nbsp; She looked inside the Buick, and had part of the answer. There was a zombie in the backseat, lying on its back and staring at her. The thing had been hog-tied. It was still active, but appeared to be in an advanced state of decay, considering it couldn’t have been dead more than three or four days. Then Danny saw it was the corpse of an old woman, with tangled silver-gray hair and skinny, wrinkled limbs. It couldn’t turn its glazed eyes to follow her; rather it turned its entire head. And when Danny walked out of view toward the back of the vehicle, the zombie struggled into a sitting position and watched her through the rear window, its chin pressed against the seat back.

  Danny heard scraping footsteps. Down the road, coming around the corner past a furrowed jut of stone, was an undead adult male. One of its hands had been wrapped with strips of cloth. The bandaging had been done while the thing was still alive, because the cloth was stained with red blood, not black. There were big, oily stains in the crotch of its khakis and under the arms. Now Danny thought she knew what had happened: This man had been bitten by the old woman in the backseat.

  He’d tied her up and was driving down the road when the Buick broke down. The cell phone suggested he had called the police while the system still worked, or maybe he never got through and the cop rolled by serendipitously. For some reason he got paranoid, or the patrolman said something he didn’t like—Danny thought the old woman was probably the subject—and the man smashed the officer’s head while he was looking at the engine. But the man died of the infection before he could switch vehicles.

  Danny was angry. She was in a state of near-permanent hangover. Her skin was blistered and sore, and she stank, and she hated this whole nightmare situation.

  The zombie shuffled toward her. The motor home was around a bend, nobody watching. Danny considered the shotgun, but picked up the fatal rock instead.