Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  “Danny Adelman,” Danny said. “I’m a sheriff from down near Los Angeles.”

  “Long way,” Mitchell said.

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of dead walking around,” Danny said. She spat on the ground but the taste of smoke remained in her mouth. “It’s zeros, huh?” she continued. “The zombies.”

  “That’s the official designation,” the black man said. “Zeros. Stupid fucking name because you can’t say a number with a zero in it without everybody flips out. You gotta say ‘naught,’ which I for one never fucking remember.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the gurgle of the Chinese engine turning over. It was Beret Boy: He’d climbed down into the boat and fired her up. He was holding his shotgun on his companions. The men who had been silent so far raised their guns in his direction but looked at Mitchell.

  “Don’t try to stop me. I’m going,” Beret Boy said.

  “Needledick,” the black man muttered.

  “Fuck it, let him go,” said Mitchell. “He can’t shoot worth a damn anyway.”

  They watched the boat lurch backward out of the mooring into which Danny had eased it. The kid knew nothing about handling watercraft. He crashed the hull of the boat against a bollard in the pier, knocking himself into the scuppers. The shotgun flew overboard. The engine quit. The boy got back to his feet, restarted the engine after several gargling attempts, then spun the wheel and got the boat pointed out to sea. A couple of civilians who had been working their way among the buildings on the pier charged at the boat; the male hurled himself into the water and began to swim after it with flailing strokes, but the boat was already well out of reach. Danny lost interest.

  “Take me to your leader,” she said, without any ironic intent.

  “Somebody go take them into custody,” Mitchell said, waving his pistol down the pier at the civilians. He drew a tube of Vicks Vapo Rub from his shirt pocket. “Put this under your nose, it cuts the smell.” Danny took this for a goodwill gesture. But Mitchell had an eager look on his face. It wasn’t simply a friendly gesture. He wanted something. “So,” he said, aiming at nonchalance, “you got any news from down south?”

  This was obviously the magic question, based on the nearly comical expression of expectation Mitchell wore. The answer was worth more than a squeeze of nose ointment.

  So Danny said “yes,” and within minutes she was in a dusty Cadillac sport utility vehicle with dried blood splashed all over the headliner, cruising into the city.

  The smoke rose up among the hills beyond downtown, a boiling black curtain behind the sunlit buildings with their optimistic geometrical shapes in the financial center. Daly City was engulfed in fire, Danny assumed, and the entire South City area. They were thoroughly cut off from the mainland. If you could swim a couple of miles over to Sausalito, you could get away. If Sausalito wasn’t infested. Otherwise, the population of downtown San Francisco, diminished as it might be, was trapped.

  The light was amber-colored and dim from the smoke, the illusion of a sunset lasting all day. The air stank. Streets were mostly clear of debris, but the sidewalks were crowded with wrecked vehicles and twisted bicycle frames. Bulldozers stood idle at some intersections. Traffic lights were dark. There were burnt areas on the pavement and dark stains of blood or oil. Broken plate glass. A Starbucks with a Ford Taurus hanging out of the window. A fire hydrant, broken off pavement-high like a tooth at the gum line, spurted water into the air; nobody paid it any attention. It might have been like that for days. A river ran from the stump of the hydrant downhill toward the bay. Here there were none of the tumbled corpses Danny had come to see as part of the landscape, the ones that were not coming back. The place had been swept of the worst.

  They drove past Telegraph Hill, and Danny heard sporadic gunfire from up there. Sharpshooters on Coit Tower, maybe. Or executions. There was a distinct feeling of martial law in the absence of people on the street; she saw pallid, grimy faces at windows, and knots of armed men and women patrolling around their little fiefdoms of a single city block. Lots of those good military satellite radios. A couple of pickup trucks loaded with canned goods cruised past with rifle-toting escorts atop the loads.

  Mitchell drove Danny along Columbus Avenue to a roadblock where it turned into Montgomery, in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid. The Cadillac crept along in a queue of a dozen other vehicles. One was turned back; it appeared to contain a wounded woman in the backseat. A couple of pickups containing food were waved in past the barricades without delay. Danny found herself examining every female face, as if in all the world there were so few women left she would be certain to find her sister. Just like that.

  She didn’t, of course.

  The barricade was manned—and it was only men—by some kind of mercenaries, very much like those she spent a lot of time disliking in Iraq. As they got close, she recognized the digital camouflage pattern she had seen back in Potter, adorning the equipment and corpses strewn around the railway station there. These privateers had the best gear. They had the body armor, the one-piece wrap-around shades, and the massive tactical wristwatches that got in your way in a genuine crisis. Their sleeve patches bore a screaming eagle—or, presumably, a hawk—rendered in gold thread over an American flag, the legend Hawkstone Security across the bottom.

  When Mitchell identified himself and Danny, the mercenaries inspected her like a soiled diaper, then waved them both through. Whatever security they were providing it wasn’t antizero. It was antipersonnel. They were keeping a tight lid on the civilians. Whose authority, Danny wondered, were they working under? The Fed? The state of California? The city? Was this a full-scale coup she’d walked into?

  Mitchell pulled the Cadillac up onto the sidewalk in front of the pyramid. There were a lot of big, heavy vehicles parked there, right up to the patio wall. Nobody was worrying about fuel economy lately.

  They climbed out of the SUV and crossed below the thick X-bracing that formed the base of the structure, above which the building looked like the point of some impossibly large spear. Or a missile, Danny thought. She’d never been in downtown San Francisco before; the closest she got was a one-night stopover a few days before her deployment at a friend’s place up near Golden Gate Park. They’d spent the time screwing, not sightseeing. Old memories flitted past in her mind but were of no more significance to her now than dead leaves.

  “There’s a plaque in the park around back dedicated to these two dogs,” Mitchell said, but lost interest in his own story. They entered the angular lobby past five more of the Hawkstone mercenaries, their automatic weapons laden with night sights and grenade launchers and assorted useless after-market crap.

  Mitchell stopped at the elevator and leaned in close, speaking with a low and rapid voice. “You’re going to be meeting Senator Vivian Anka. She happened to be in town when this thing happened, and she’s pretty pissed off about it. She’s kind of—she’s a little paranoid. Just play it cool, okay? These Hawkstone guys—”

  The elevator bell rang, the doors slid open. Inside the car was another of the hired mercenaries. He wrinkled his nose. They rode up the tower in silence.

  The thing that shocked Danny most was the suits. These people were clean, well-dressed, and wore suits with neckties. Their faces were haggard; at least they had the decency to lose sleep. But up here above the city, with spectacular views of Nob Hill and the bay, it still seemed as if life could return to normal at any moment. The power worked, the phones worked, at least within the building; there were secretaries and assistants scuttling around, and the air smelled clean and conditioned. While they stood in a waiting area and looked out of the thirty-third story windows onto the city, Mitchell explained briefly that the government had moved from the Civic Center because the huge number of homeless people in the neighborhood meant a high concentration of zeros hidden away in every corner.

  “At first the CDC was running the operation, but they got eaten. You can’t run in a pressurized cleansuit. We cleared most of C
hinatown but the area around St. Francis Memorial Hospital was still infested,” he said, staring into the distance. “The Presidio was gone, and Golden Gate Bridge was blocked off in both directions. The Haight was like a slaughterhouse.”

  At first Danny wasn’t listening, but she began to take interest as Mitchell waved vaguely in the direction of the landmarks he described. She wanted a map of the city. She had a feeling things were even worse than they appeared: If Mitchell’s account was accurate, the entire area to the north was swarming with the undead, and they were advancing from the west. Danny didn’t know how many people remained alive in town, but if it was a quarter million, there soon wouldn’t be anywhere to keep them indoors. They were about to be driven into the bay.

  There was one good thing about the situation, although only for her. Survivors would be compressed into the minimum amount of space. Easier to find a runaway girl from Forest Peak, if there was one. The voice in her head started to tell her she was crazy, her whole mission was crazy. It had been telling Danny this since she left Boscombe Field.

  An aide to Senator Anka approached them, cutting off Danny’s internal monologue. The aide walked as if his shoes were fragile. He bore with him two cups of coffee in cardboard sleeves. The smell of it made Danny salivate. She hadn’t had coffee since the day before the world ended. This was fresh and black.

  “I’m Eric Deforza,” he said. “Welcome to San Francisco. I hear you came all the way from Los Angeles?”

  “Long way,” Danny said, burning her mouth on the delicious, bitter drink. It cut through the stale alcohol sugar on her tongue and the heat brought her belly back to life. She was suddenly ravenous.

  “You drove in a car?” Eric said.

  “Police cruiser. Had a convoy of civilians with me. They’re in a safe place now. I don’t know how long that situation will last.”

  “Ought to get some kind of medal for that.”

  “Right,” Danny said, thinking of the Purple Heart ribbon she’d buried in a bureau drawer back home. Eric wasn’t getting much conversational purchase with Danny, so he turned to Mitchell.

  “Anybody else come along today?”

  “Nobody,” Mitchell said. “Fires kind of warn people off.”

  “What brings her here?”

  “Ask her,” Mitchell said. Eric turned back to Danny.

  “Looking for somebody in charge,” Danny said. It wasn’t her final goal, only her immediate goal, but true enough for now. “First place I found so far where anybody’s fighting back.”

  Eric’s face went pale. “In the entire state?”

  “As far as I saw it, yeah,” Danny said. She knew she ought to be embroidering, adding in details to make her story sound more interesting, but she lacked the impetus. She hadn’t actually seen much of the state, despite the distance she’d traveled; she had avoided anyplace with a population over a couple of thousand, sticking to back roads and old highways from before the freeway system.

  She studied Eric’s face. He was scared to death. Something was bothering her about this whole setup. Here she was in possibly the only major seat of government left in California, showing up without credentials, filthy as a hyena, and she had been whisked straight to the most powerful person in town. Where were the layers of bureaucrats, the paper-pushers and petty tyrants in charge of filtering out people like her? Did they really imagine she’d showed up without an agenda of her own?

  This suggested to Danny that despite the appearance of official coordination here atop the pyramid, they were only barely in control of the situation, and altogether in the dark as far as information went. This was disheartening, but it made Danny’s task simpler. They had nothing to offer her besides data. She had to find out what she wanted to know, and then she could go. Nothing to hold her. No brave band of survivors to join. This was merely the last vestige of the old system, on its way out.

  Eric had been saying something. Danny didn’t hear it. Mitchell was on his feet, so Danny stood up. Eric repeated his statement: “Follow me, please?” Danny walked behind him across the veined marble floor.

  “Ma’am,” Danny said to the senator. She felt self-conscious for the first time since the crisis began. Danny was hardwired to respond to authority figures, even civilian ones, and she was not shipshape for this interview. There was some kind of expensive scent in the air. Senator Anka wore a silk scarf knotted loosely at her throat. It was printed with golden anchors and horseshoes on a navy blue background. Her charcoal wool skirt suit was immaculate, tailored to lengthen her short figure, and somehow managed to carry the precision of a uniform while remaining feminine and delicate. Anka’s skin looked as soft as chamois and hung at her jaw but was tight around the eyes. Almost time for a new facelift. Danny didn’t use words like “feminine” or “delicate” in her mind when contemplating the congress-woman; it was shorthand as always. “Money,” was the summary of Anka’s appearance. The rest was implied. Danny took all of this in at a glance as she was led into the inner sanctum, a beige-carpeted corner office with thick, flame-mahogany veneered furniture and golfing prints on the walls. Some male executive’s office, before the crisis.

  Danny wasn’t offered a chair, obviously because they’d never get the stink out of it once she was gone. Danny stood at ease in the center of the floor, with Anka behind the desk and a couple of junior aides seated on a bench against the wall farthest from the windows, the female one taking notes. Kids younger than Eric. There was a vase of flowers on the desk, but the flowers were dying, dropping petals. Like the entire city, Danny thought.

  “So you’re from Los Angeles,” Anka said. “Long drive.”

  “Yeah,” Danny said, and felt stupid. You needed a patter for these occasions.

  “Did you come here alone?”

  “I brought a group out from the San Bernardino mountains. They’re in a safe place while I scout around up here.”

  “Part of the Eisenmann Plan, presumably. What brings you to San Francisco?”

  “I have people up here,” Danny said, and wished she’d said something more clever. Again, there were obviously right answers, things they wanted to hear, and Danny could tell she’d given the wrong answer. So she continued, “Los Angeles is on fire. You must have heard. It’s swarming with zom—with zeros. Police and Rescue was down within five hours of the outbreak. I was in an isolated community. We got out on a wave of dead.”

  “We heard all about that,” Anka said. “Los Angeles went a little sooner than elsewhere. It was on the news, while there was still news. Now we don’t even have the internet.” Danny could see her audience losing interest. These people were hungry for real facts, something useful. They were more isolated than Danny had at first imagined. Maybe it was her who needed to be asking questions, not the senator.

  “I can be more useful if I have some idea of the situation,” Danny said. “Don’t want to repeat what you already know. I saw a lot of action between here and the Southland and I can maybe fill in the blanks. Roads, railways, towns, some are open. Some are not.”

  Senator Anka leaned forward, revealing a string of irregular pearls like baby’s teeth that dangled in her ruffled cleavage. It seemed Danny had passed some kind of initial inspection. Now, apparently, they could talk. “Find her a chair, Kyle,” Anka said, and the male aide hustled out of the room. He returned moments later with a steel folding model. Danny was grateful. She sat, and her bones ached in concert. Anka opened her sparkling red mouth and let it hang, waiting for the words to enter it, certain they would come. Her job in better times was to speak. She began:

  “Some days ago, as I assume you know, terrorists attacked sixty-three world cities with a biological weapon. It may have been more cities. We don’t have complete data. The attacks were coordinated and occurred within a half-hour period, worldwide. The biological agent is unknown but believed to be engineered, because there’s no disease like it. We have laboratory people working on that in Denver, here, and in Virginia. Or we think so. D.C. has broken c
ontact, but that’s part of the program for these kinds of situations. Don’t want to let them know who they’ve gotten or not gotten at the federal level. Whoever they might be.”

  The senator sounded bitter at this. Danny imagined a prominent member of the party in power would not be amused to find herself out of the loop. Maybe she was missing the caviar down in the luxury fallout shelters Washington was rumored to have.

  The famous voice smoothed out again: “All of which information is not at your pay grade. But we’re in this together.”

  “And then?” Danny said. She realized she was biting rags of skin from around her fingernails, making them bleed through the dirt. She folded her hands. The senator’s hands, Danny observed, looked much older than the rest of her, the skin papery and spotted, knuckles prominent. Anka selected her facts and went on.

  “There is a set of contingency plans for biological attack, but not on this scale. The disease moved swiftly.”

  “I saw it,” Danny said. “People went crazy and ran and when they ran they spread it to the next people. It spread as fast as we can run.”

  “Or drive,” Anka added. “Most people had only ten minutes from exposure before they collapsed, but it could incubate for hours in the right person. You may have seen this. We even have some immune carriers isolated at the medical center near here. Infected, capable of transmission, but themselves unaffected by symptoms. The virus seems capable of changing its methods.”

  “I want to talk to you about that,” Danny said. “They’re getting smarter. The—the zeros.”

  Anka’s eyes cut to the aides, who were listening politely. She gave her head a single, slight shake. Danny didn’t pursue the subject.

  “Merely a side effect,” Anka said, a bit of nonsense to keep the silence from becoming punctuation. She hurried on: “The main thing is the disease no longer communicates by air. Only through bites or introduction into the bloodstream. Which is a good thing. A positive development. It’s much safer now.”