Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

Troy Huppert lay on his bunk with an open window beside his head, listening to faint sounds of revelry coming from the RV. It was good to know that Danny Adelman was letting what was left of her hair down. They all needed her to take care of herself, and that included R&R. Troy liked her as a person. She’d been one of the first people to welcome him to Forest Peak and mean it. But Troy also needed Danny to keep herself alive and functional for another, more selfish reason: He was probably second in line to command the group, if Danny was out of commission.

  Troy was a capable leader and an effective part of any team, but he never imposed his personality on a situation. That came from the inner-city upbringing. You could join the ever-escalating gangsta sweepstakes and walk with the most elaborate bop, wear the latest fashions, and live in a state of crippling self-consciousness at all times, or you could fade into the background and make your small plans to get out of town.

  Contrary to popular imagery, life in Watts wasn’t, for most people, a battle with gangs, drugs, and the lure of easy money. There was such a battle, and it was waged right out in front of decent folks’ homes, but most of them weren’t involved in the party. Most of them were living three generations to a house, putting together an income one month at a time. The problem was jobs. If you wanted to work, you spent half your time finding it and the other half doing it.

  Troy had gotten out of town. Way out of town, until he was what his grandmother referred to as a “nigro pioneer.” He was living up in a remote, wild place where most people were white. He was trailblazing. It wasn’t intentional. He’d never even heard of Forest Peak. He had been a trainee at the fire station five blocks from the house he grew up in. There was a notice on the bulletin board: summer training program for wilderness fire-fighting. That was where the overtime was. Fighting blazes during the ever-worsening wildfire seasons, deep in the mountains where rich idiots built mansions. He was in.

  Two years later, he was still in, and settled in Forest Peak. No mansions there. But every morning he woke up feeling free. Who gave a damn if he was the only brother in town? The other dudes at the firehouse knew he was cooler than them. They welcomed the change. And he knew somebody had helped make all that possible: The locals figured if they could have a lady sheriff, they could even have a colored fireman.

  But now it was only the lady sheriff between him and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis. He didn’t feel like he was ready for it. Amy the veterinarian was Danny’s understudy, but she wasn’t a leader. She was the sidekick type. Troy listened to the faraway laughter and wondered how many of them would be called to lead, regardless of their qualifications, as the boldest among them continued to die.

  •

  Danny woke up suddenly from a dreamless sleep. The sun was slanting in through the windows. The air-conditioning hummed in the ceiling. She was disoriented for a few seconds: strange bed, strange room. Then she understood where she was: she’d passed out inside the motor home. It was morning. She was still alive, so her schedule of watches must have been kept overnight. A surge of panic hit her, but she stayed still. If something was wrong, she would have heard about it. Boscombe Field was apparently still peaceful. Danny yawned and stretched, which hurt all over. Then she rolled over and saw, on the bedside console, the empty jar of La Mer cream.

  She stumbled down the short passage past the bathroom into the living area of the RV, the empty jar in her hand. Patrick was lying on the converted sofa bed, watching a movie on the big TV that flipped out of the bulkhead wall. The sound was almost inaudible. Danny ran her fingers through her hair and realized her scalp felt cool and her fingers were running through a downy layer of short fluff, not hair.

  “Good morning,” Patrick said, as Danny ducked back into the bathroom for a look in the triple-view mirror. Someone had cut her hair to about half an inch long, all over her head. Only in a few places was there any trace of the burning.

  “Did you cut my hair?” Danny asked.

  “Yes,” Patrick said. “I had to wait till you passed out, though.”

  “And what about this?” She emerged from the bathroom and held up the cream jar in what she hoped was an accusatory manner.

  “It’s empty,” Patrick said. The movie on the TV was in black and white and Gregory Peck was in it. He was a submarine captain. Danny had no idea what movie it was; the only thing she’d seen Gregory Peck in was The Omen, on television. Her father had let her stay up late to watch it.

  “Yes,” said Danny. “I noticed that, too. And I was wondering where all that cream went.”

  “On you, of course. Your arms, your face, and your back.”

  “So you’ve seen my back?”

  “And more. You have no secrets from me, Sheriff D.”

  Danny’s face turned red. She was blushing so hard her ears were hot. Way to go, have a blackout in front of people, the voice said. And: Now he knows you’re deformed.

  “I must have passed out.”

  “It was your idea to put the cream on,” Patrick said. “You ate some of it, if I remember right. But the haircut was my idea. I didn’t want you shedding all over the bed.”

  There was no judgment in his voice, he had no problem making eye contact, and if he felt any kind of revulsion for Danny’s condition, he was hiding it extremely well. Which Danny knew by now he was incapable of. So, incredibly, he must have had no problem with it.

  “It’s disgusting,” Danny said. “My back.”

  “It’s impressive,” Patrick said. “I assume you got burned in the line of duty?”

  “Yeah. Hit an IED—an improvised bomb—on the side of the road in Basra. Blew our M3 Bradley upside down, with me in it. My buddy Harlan got thrown out, except for part of his brain that stayed with me. Fuckin’ thing caught fire, so I crawled out and went after Harlan and I didn’t even know I was on fire until one of the other guys started throwing dirt on me.”

  As she spoke, Danny felt an immense, almost physical weight lift inside her, like an iron plate that had been clamped down on some part of her mind. A sore, cramped, mental limb was free again that had been bent double all this time. She had never told anybody outside the military exactly what had happened that day, not even Amy. Now, in a few words, it was out. She was trusting Patrick with things she didn’t trust to herself, and she didn’t know why. Along with the rush of freedom inside her came a rush of fear, like parachuting for the first time.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” she said, too quickly. It felt ridiculous to have said it, and she understood on some level that she was letting Patrick down, dishonoring him by doubting her own trust in him. “I mean I know you won’t, but I never—”

  Patrick raised a languid hand.

  “Lie down, I’m safe,” he said, and patted the bed beside him. Danny took a chair by the bed. It was the best she could do.

  “What movie is that?” she said, desperate to change the subject.

  “On the Beach. Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. And Anthony Perkins one year before Psycho, with the worst Australian accent you ever heard. It’s about the end of the world, this cloud of radiation that circles the planet and kills everybody except in Australia, where they have a few extra months. And it’s what they do with their time until the cloud comes.”

  “No shit. How can you watch that?”

  “Under the circumstances? I’m looking for ideas.”

  “Did you ever see The Day the World Ended? That was awesome. I saw it when I was six. It scared the hell out of me…Also black and white,” Danny concluded, lamely.

  “Starring who?”

  “It has a three-eyed mutant with extra arms.”

  “I see. We also have Night of the Living Dead here. Weaver’s choice, not mine. Maybe we should watch it to see if there are any pointers we could use.”

  “Weird how much this situation…” Danny trailed off, thoughtful.

  That was something that mystified her. The real plague was so similar to the made-up one in the old movies. Not in every way,
of course. But the idea that it bore any similarity was weird. How could the dead get up again? That was strange enough. But the dead eating the living—it was as if God was having a laugh at mankind’s expense. Or the other way around. The theory had been forming in Danny’s head that this disease must be engineered somehow. She didn’t go in much for theories that lacked practical applications, but the more you knew your enemy, the more you knew how to win.

  “You know how they figured out how to splice genes to order?” Danny said.

  Patrick’s eyebrows went up. “Apropos of what?”

  “What’s ‘apropos’?”

  “I mean where did that come from?”

  “Zombies. Real zombies. We’re talking about old movies, and I’m wondering if maybe the Iranians or North Korea or somebody has a disease factory set up and made this thing to order. Especially North Korea. I hear their guy, Kim Jing Ding or whatever his name is, he’s a big movie buff. Maybe they chopped up some DNA and sewed it back together for him. A little of this, a little of that, right? And made a zombie disease.”

  Patrick shook his head. “Jesus, I don’t know. I’m still trying to get my head around everything that’s happened, and you’re doing detective work to figure out whodunit.”

  Danny stood up and ran her fingers over her short-cropped head again. Patrick was right. No point speculating on the big picture. She was thinking way ahead of where they needed to be.

  “I gotta go see if my uniform is dry yet,” she said.

  “How does it feel?” Patrick asked, as Danny reached for the door handle. She paused.

  “I guess I’m glad I told you.”

  “I mean how does your back feel? We rubbed two hundred bucks on it last night.”

  In the end it came down to this, once the supplies were counted and the rate of burn estimated: They could last a month without ever setting foot outside the airfield fence, if they lived modestly. Food was the shortest supply. But foraging parties could probably reach out into the sparse communities around Boscombe Field and put together enough sustenance for another few weeks, after which they would have to venture into the big cities.

  A long-distance supply run would have been the perfect excuse for Danny to leave the airfield for a few days, but nobody liked the idea. Ultimately Danny didn’t argue the point. They could wait until the supplies were low, then make the foraging run. It was all the same to Danny.

  She was leaving either way.

  7

  There was a narrow slice of moon hung low in the starry sky. The night was hot, but a little breeze was blowing down off the mountains and it might be quite chilly by morning. The Milky Way arched up through the velvet darkness, a bridge of stars halfway to infinity, and the world below was bathed in darkness and quiet. A hermit come down from the mountains would not have known there was anything amiss. Boscombe Field showed a couple of cheerful lights in windows, the generator rumbled in its shed, and except for the evening watch patrolling the perimeter fence, it was a scene of reassuring order and calm. Danny didn’t like it.

  She wasn’t the only one. On her patrol around the airfield, Danny found Wulf sitting in the depths of a hangar doorway. He was staring out into the darkness beyond the perimeter. Danny studied his profile. His skin was so wrinkled, each line as sharply defined as a razor cut, that he almost appeared to have been shattered and reassembled by someone unhandy. His bent, purple nose and the wilderness of yellowed whiskers beneath it caught the overhead light and seemed to glow on their own.

  Danny wanted to thank Wulf for saving her life and Amy’s, but she knew he’d shrug it off with a curse. He liked shooting the undead, that was all. She saw that he had a way of moving his lips as if speaking, even when he was not. She wondered if there was a voice in there, below the surface, making his lips move. She wondered if she moved her own lips when the voice was speaking inside her own head.

  Then Wulf spoke aloud, surprising Danny: “You having trouble sleeping, Sheriff? Nightmares?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I been there. Come back after three years in combat, nobody gets what you been through, so you shut them out. Can’t keep a relationship going. Sent that man of yours packing, right? Don’t let anybody too close. Feelings are dangerous. You even kept your little sister at arm’s length.”

  Danny didn’t like this line of reasoning at all. This old bag of shit wasn’t allowed to mention Kelley.

  “We were talking about you, not me.”

  “I’m talking about both of us. Can’t trust people, don’t like surprises. Always got one eye on the tree line looking for VC or the Mujahideen or whoever it is, other eye still seeing what you went through back there…Ain’t no way to live.”

  “If I want a shrink,” Danny said, with great dignity, “I’ll find one that lives indoors, okay?”

  Wulf spat on the ground and turned to confront Danny, and now the light caught only half of his face, like a close-up picture of a quarter moon, with the rims of craters and mountains lit up on one side, and darkness on the other. His one illuminated bloodshot eye glistened in its nest of ravaged skin.

  “Every day it gets a little worse,” he said, and spittle flecked his beard. “Right now you can bury yourself in the job, folks think you’re a hard-working little girl. But ten years from now, if you’re still around, the ghosts will still be crawling up on you, the enemy coming to kill you in the dark, and you’ll be drowning the sons of bitches in alcohol just so’s you can get out of bed. And one day you won’t even go to bed. Then we can talk about me.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” Danny retorted. “Post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I can handle it. Not everybody that goes through combat ends up a fuckin’ derelict like you.”

  Wulf wasn’t listening. He was looking out into the darkness again, combing his beard with his fingers.

  “Every night your buddies die in the mud again, and you kill some foreign shithead right back for it, and you bury ’em all in the back of your mind. Every day, you’re surrounded by civilians so goddamn useless, they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the bottom. It makes you mad, don’t it? Makes you so damn mad you hate your friends for it. You get to feeling pretty alone after a while. And then, a while after that, you are alone.”

  “And what do you do about it?”

  The question came out of Danny’s mouth without her permission. Wulf had her full attention. She wanted to know if he had an answer, despite the shape he was in. Maybe something that would work better for her than it worked for him. He turned his old eyes back upon her, and Danny felt a dislocated sense of shame again.

  “I go camping,” Wulf said. “I been camping pretty steady since nineteen hundred and ninety-one.”

  Danny walked into the tower building. The downstairs consisted of an office and a place to park a vending machine; the rest was occupied by a flight of perforated metal stairs leading upward. She paused to inspect the contents of the vending machine—it was the usual assortment of brand-name candy and weird snack items nobody would ever eat. Unless they were surrounded by zombies and there was nothing else, the voice reminded her. Amy came in through the same door behind Danny, yawning. Danny waved her away and put her boot on the bottom step of the stairs. Amy put her hand over Danny’s, pressing it to the handrail.

  “Wait,” Amy said. “I’m worried about what you’ve got in mind.”

  “I got nothing in mind,” Danny said.

  Amy was looking right through her. “Now that we’re here, you’re thinking of going off alone.”

  Danny turned her eyes to the window. She could see nothing there but her own reflection. “Why do you say—”

  “Listen,” Amy interrupted. “I read Kelley’s note, and I know you. You don’t like people handing you problems you can’t solve. It’s gotta be eating you up. But there’s two ways it can go. Kelley is alive, or Kelley is not alive. In either case, your job is to keep on liv
ing. No lone wolfing it.”

  “Where do you get that idea?”

  “Come on. You know it’s true.”

  Danny scrubbed her face with her hands, stinging both face and hands, neither of which were fit to be scrubbed. She felt tired and itchy and stupid again. She didn’t want to be questioned.

  “I gotta find her, Amy. Even if she’s one of them. In her letter she said I promised to come back and I never did. I gotta do better this time.”

  “That guy Patrick. You passed out but I stayed up with him. While you were snoring, he was crying, all last night—because of his friend Weaver.”

  “Yeah, but he knows Weaver is dead. Kelley’s in mumbo.”

  Amy laughed out loud: “In limbo, you mean.”

  Danny was angry again, emotion flashing up. She wished it wasn’t so much easier to be pissed off than to try to figure everything out and explain herself.

  “Okay, limbo. Big fucking deal. You said we were in Doom Valley before. It’s Death Valley. You always call things the wrong thing.”

  Amy was not set back by this speech. She laughed again, fondly, and that was even worse. Danny didn’t want Amy to be affectionate with her. It made her plans harder to carry out.

  “You got a damn weird sense of humor, you know that?” Danny said, looking for a reaction.

  Amy smiled, but now her eyes were sad. “And you have no sense of humor whatsoever. It’s a part of your charm. Things will get back to normal, Danny. I think they will.”

  Danny flailed her free hand around her head, shooing the idea away. “For who? The survivors? The zombies? Normal is gone.”

  Danny pulled away from Amy and walked up the perforated metal stairs to the control tower. She could hear the door below slam as Amy left, and she felt guilty and mean.

  The control tower’s air traffic control room was a small space, with walls of green glass that angled sharply outward from the bottom to the top to reduce glare in the daytime. Maria was at the radio. Most of the gear looked ancient and barely adequate, the technology utterly outmoded. But the satellite radio was extraordinarily good gear for such a remote outpost. Danny got the sense that they had built this place to expand, but had never expanded it. Except for the glorious communications device before which Maria now sat.