Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  “I hadn’t thought of it quite that way,” Danny said.

  “We must be positive even as we are realistic, yes? Our scientists call this tropism, I believe. The virus is adapting itself to the host. It was difficult enough when the afflicted collapsed and died of the airborne form of the disease. That alone was catastrophic. But then they rose up again, apparently helpless, and survivors in the tens of thousands everywhere began taking them to first responders. Hospitals, police, fire stations, even public offices, everywhere was crammed with these so-called zeros. It was an impossible situation. Then when they began to attack, to feed, if you will, the first of the living to succumb were of course the professionals trained to deal with a crisis.”

  “Those paramilitary contractors guarding the building seem to be in pretty good shape.”

  “They have saved our bacon, so to speak. Without them we’d be in chaos. Private enterprise is always the best way to go, and I say that despite my status as a career public servant. Nothing like profits to motivate a person. Of course presently we’re measuring profits in IOUs, but still. In any case they weren’t on the front lines initially, so they enjoyed the opportunity to respond from positions outside the epicenters of the disease. Which they did, securing strongholds such as this one, and guiding the sweeps to clear the streets and buildings. We owe them the admirable calm that pertains outside today, which I’m sure you observed.”

  “Yes,” Danny said. She didn’t have much of an opinion of the calm outside yet, but she thought she probably didn’t like it. It was shoot-on-sight calm. Senator Anka nodded and continued.

  “Of course we suffered a massive influx of panicked citizens from all directions, and they brought the sickness with them. That’s why we’re allowing the fires to burn, to help cleanse some of the worst areas.” And because you have nobody to fight the fires, Danny thought, remembering the hydrant spurting down the street outside. “The private security people have done wonders to sort that out, and we’ve started organizing everyone into local and nonlocal populations so we can determine how best to house them and possibly move them if the safe area requires adjustment. It also represents a database of survivors, which we will need eventually. It’s all on computers right here in this building.”

  Danny’s heart was racing: They were taking names of outsiders. Lists of refugees. Kelley.

  She missed some of what the senator was saying, tuning back in halfway through: “…Despite which, on a larger scale, we lost the state capital; if you came up the coast, you know that. So this is essentially our game to play at the present time. You lost San Diego in the south. Silicon Valley is remarkable well-preserved thus far, thanks to the many gated communities and the high vacancy rates in the areas hardest hit by the economy. But a number of the zeros are coming up, migrating, so to speak, from Mexico and San Diego and there may be a contagion problem within a few days. It’s a disease, you understand. A public health crisis, and it has to be addressed as such. It’s not a military situation.”

  Danny involuntarily shook her head. “Does Washington agree with that? The Pentagon?”

  Anka crimped her mouth into a small, patronizing smile.

  “I’m not dealing with Washington, Sheriff. Our communications systems are working well on the West Coast but we have temporarily lost contact with the Eastern Seaboard, I regret to say. I thought I made that clear. The reasons for this will come out in the congressional hearings I will most certainly introduce once this situation has blown over. But don’t imagine I’m without allies. We have contact with installations in Colorado and North Dakota, Texas, and Alaska. More will go online as things stabilize. Am I telling you anything you don’t know?”

  Danny shrugged. It was all news to her; it just wasn’t important. She owed these people something, however. They needed to know what she’d seen in Potter.

  “Thanks for the briefing. Lemme tell you a couple things,” Danny said. “About those things. You want to deal with this like it was the flu or something, you will lose a lot of people. This is a military situation, no question. I gotta disagree with you on that. They eat people. They die if you smash their brains. The disease angle I’ll buy, sure, if that’s where it comes from, but it’s not what’s killing people now. Those zeros are what’s killing people.”

  Anka’s face was puckered with distaste. She wasn’t looking for advice. “You fancy yourself quite an expert, I take it. You might be interested to know I get twice-daily briefings from our top people on the ground, here.”

  “No offense meant, ma’am,” Danny said. She could see Senator Anka was becoming angry, but what mattered right now was speaking the truth. “If you get briefings, you probably heard they can hibernate while waiting for people to show up. Don’t shake your head at me,” she added.

  Anka was all but sticking her fingers in her ears, but the aides were sitting bolt upright, staring at Danny. Good. At least somebody was listening. Danny kept on talking, her ears hot with anger, looking at Anka but aiming her words at the aides.

  “Did your briefings tell you how they find living people? The zeros, ma’am, they hunt by sense of smell. I’m sure of it. They can see and hear, but that doesn’t tell them who’s who. They smell the living. I’ve watched them in action. You can be perfectly still and quiet and they home right in on you anyway. But if there’s a real bad smell in the air, they can’t lock on. I seen it. They hunt by smell. I think maybe they can smell our breath.”

  Senator Anka rose to her feet. She was trembling. She turned to the window. Her hands were knotted into small, triangular fists.

  “You think you know more than we do?” she said, in her best speech-making voice. “We have scientists, real scientists, at work in locations around this area. Promising them a fortune because they won’t work voluntarily. When I get back to D.C., of course, my surviving colleagues will refuse to reimburse the expense, but you know what I said? I said, ‘This isn’t about money.’ I certainly hope the voters appreciate that fact.”

  She turned to face Danny, but her eyes took in the aides, as well, daring them not to listen: “Oh, yes, I too have sacrificed. I worked so hard for a transformation of the way they do business in Washington, and what is my reward? I am accused of being an insider, of being nothing more than a career player. Don’t talk to me about partisan politics. I’ve spent years reaching across the damn aisle and my reward has been opprobrium at every turn! Obloquy! Have you ever heard of anybody in the entire Congress that worked harder to push the president to the center, to get him right there in that sweet spot where Middle America is comfortable? Of course not. I’m the one. He might still be alive if he listened to me sooner. And now—this. Don’t lecture me, you ragamuffin!”

  Danny realized her mouth was hanging open. She closed it with a click. The good senator was out of her well-groomed mind.

  Danny thought it was probably best to try one more time, then get the hell out of Madame Ahab’s presence. The aides were listening; they might pass word to people who still had a toe dipped in the reality pool.

  “That’s a heck of a burden you’re carrying, Senator. Listen, I got one more important thing to tell you about those things. The zeros, not the voters, I mean. It’s important. They’re getting smarter and faster. The ones nearest the epicenters, like here? They’re dumbasses, if you’ll excuse me. The farther out you get, the better they get. You know? I don’t think it’s how far, though. I think it’s when they got infected and died. The ones that came up real recently are a lot different from the first ones. They’re…you know. Getting smarter.”

  Danny remembered the word she wanted: evolving. But it was too late. The senator wasn’t listening, anyway. She had bent over the edge of her desk, scribbling notes with a silver fountain pen. Not, Danny suspected, notes about the lifestyle of zeros as reported by a sheriff from San Bernardino. The senator threw down the pen, folded the sheet of paper, and held it over her head as if signaling a waiter. She kept her arm straight; the sheet rattled in her gr
ip. She would not look up. She wasn’t going to look at anyone, now. She snapped the paper in the air, once, signaling her impatience. She was sulking, Danny considered. Who knew. The aides glanced at each other, Danny saw, with a distinct roll of the eyes; then the female took the sheet of paper and left the room.

  “You think you know so much,” Anka muttered. “Everybody knows more than I do, stuck here incommunicado with all my potential for leadership bottled up in this ridiculous architectural folly. They have their orders, naturally. Hawkstone, excellent people, but they don’t get their paychecks from me. That’s the problem: We have privatized too much. Money talks. Since the downturn, only money talks, preferably gold. What happened to loyalty and love of country? Patrie, if you will? I’ve been overridden, probably by the minority leadership. They’ve been waiting for this. This is their chance to humiliate me for their defeats.”

  “I appreciate you giving me the big-picture stuff,” Danny said, to break the expanding silence. She got to her feet, ready to be ushered out. But Anka seemed to gather herself back together, to become present. She met Danny’s eyes with her own. The dark mood appeared to have evaporated. She even smiled back with her gleaming political teeth.

  Danny tried one more time: “I can offer your people some tactical information on dealing with those things. And I can give you some routes downstate, plus some idea where the major concentrations are, if you need to evacuate.” Danny was putting her cards on the table. They weren’t very good cards, now that she named them. But it sounded as if the unhinged senator was as isolated as Danny was. Even the illusion of information might now be useful. “I also have an idea of where the survivors are coming from. If you can give me lists of people you’ve taken in, and where they came from, maybe I can cross-check those with what I know and fill in some of the picture.”

  “That would be excellent,” Senator Anka said. Danny could feel the older woman’s interest draining away. Anka had been so desperate for information she’d allowed this disgusting creature into her inner sanctum, and now she wanted to get her out as quickly as she could. It was written on her face for Danny to see. “I’ll have my people liaise with you downstairs,” she continued. “Sometime soon. They’ll report back to me. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  Danny thought of coming right out and asking for help searching for her sister, but she’d already started to play that angle by asking for access to personnel lists. She had a strong hunch that the direct approach would not work. These people didn’t have the time or resources for personal concerns. They’d probably lost everyone themselves. Danny would become just another frantic relative instead of a useful professional resource. She didn’t think she would be granted another audience with the Great Lady, so this was it, her only chance at a bird’s-eye view of the crisis nationwide. There had to be something else worth knowing. It was so little she’d been told.

  But there might not be any more information. Danny thought of the wildfires that sometimes swept her home region, scorching the mountainsides. How, in those crises, they were always looking for eyewitness accounts to make sense of the bigger situation, and how the eyewitnesses always wanted the big picture back: how much of the fire was contained, how many people had been evacuated.

  “One thing,” Danny said. “About how much has this situation been contained?”

  “Contained?” Anka repeated. Her face was blank.

  “I mean is it spreading, is the problem under control, are we at 20 percent, 50 percent?”

  “We don’t think of it in those terms,” the senator said, and Danny had her answer.

  A thin streak of anger passed through Danny’s mind. She wanted to snap at this slick woman with her illusions of power and control, knock her out of the trance she was in. At a gesture, the male aide stood up and crossed to Danny, as if to take her chair. Interview over. Danny wasn’t quite finished. She wanted to get the last word.

  “Why did you choose this building for your HQ?” Danny asked.

  Anka was surprised by the question. “Why do you ask?”

  “You planning to use a chopper to get out of town when the zeros break through?”

  Danny stood up and leaned over the desk. The senator’s face became cold and haughty, like photographs Danny had seen.

  “I do have a helicopter at my disposal,” Anka said, her voice high and self-righteous. “But we won’t be fleeing the city, thank you.”

  Danny shrugged and turned to the door. “Good,” she said, pausing in the doorway, “because this here is the only building in town that hasn’t got a roof to land it on.”

  With that, Danny walked out of the room. The male aide closed the door on her back and Danny could hear Senator Anka’s voice raised in anger behind the inch-thick wooden panel.

  Mitchell met her in the waiting area, and Eric silently escorted them to the elevator and the grim private security man inside. The senator hadn’t shaken her hand, Danny realized, coming in or going out. Probably scared to death of the contagion. She didn’t understand it wasn’t the disease they had to worry about; it was the undead. She had said this wasn’t a military situation. She was dead wrong. And the way Anka’s eyes went cold at Danny’s use of the word “containment” was significant. The most important thing of all. How much was the problem contained? The number, appropriately enough, that Vivian Anka hadn’t said—was zero.

  The barracks had been an internet service company’s worker-bee offices until the rise of the dead. Now the chest-high purple-gray cubicle walls partitioned off sleeping spaces: two per cubicle on the floor, sometimes a third crashed out on the desk surface above. There were little vinyl action figures and framed photos and Dilbert cartoons cluttering the margins of the cubicles, along with half-deflated Mylar birthday balloons, novelty calendars, dying plants in plastic pots, and junk-food wrappers.

  Mitchell led Danny to a cubicle halfway along the second floor. It was occupied by a young Native-American-looking woman lying in a sleeping bag. She had two black eyes and her nose in a splint. Her copper-colored skin was yellow at the high points; she looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. She recoiled involuntarily when she saw Danny, and stood up, the sleeping bag pooling at her feet.

  “Yanaba, this is Danielle. She’ll be your roomie for a while. Don’t worry, we’ll get her cleaned up.”

  Mitchell walked away with that, leaving Yanaba and Danny standing in awkward silence.

  “You want a shower?” Yanaba finally said. There were no pleasantries to exchange, after all. They were not pleased to meet each other and Danny was not welcome. They were merely there, and that was that. “There’s a sign-up sheet by the stairwell,” Yanaba continued. “It’s probably wide open right now.” She spoke in a slow, deliberate cadence, as if reading her words from an invisible page.

  Danny grunted and walked down the hall. An hour later she was clean, the remains of her uniform were in an industrial laundry in the commandeered hotel basement next door (the hotel rooms were obviously reserved for the Hawkstone paramilitary elite, with lesser folks crashing wherever there was cover), and Danny was wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt that had Datacon 2006 written across the chest.

  Mitchell was gone, presumably back to his post. Danny didn’t know if Yanaba was still in the designated cubicle, because she didn’t bother going back to it. She’d brought nothing with her but the uniform. The Mustang with her accumulated gear inside was hidden a mile from the marina from which she had embarked on her coastal voyage.

  Danny found herself patrolling the building, looking at it from a security standpoint: it was a piss-poor place to be when the zeros broke through the front lines, as Danny had no doubt they would. Huge walls of glass, fire doors and blind alleys, little stairways leading up the outside of the structure onto the roof, where there was an employee patio and some highly insecure plate-glass doors. It was fine security against intelligent human beings, but Danny had seen the flesh-eaters push their way through a wall of glass back in Forest Peak.
She knew the only deterrent for them was sheer structural resistance.

  Still, this was a temporary arrangement. She didn’t have to put up with it for long.

  A man in a window cleaner’s coveralls approached Danny as the sun was going down behind the smoke, casting the city in bronze. He was lean and tough and his eyes never stopped checking the environment around him. Either ex-military or a street person, Danny thought. Or both, like you and Wulf, the head-voice added. His cheeks were caved in and strapped with creases. He looked old. He was not as old as he looked.

  “You’re Sheriff Adelman, right?” he said. Danny nodded. “You match the description. I’m Kaufman. Welcome to Oz.”

  Danny followed him down to the lobby. Across the plaza outside, a convoy of minivans and a Jeep was idling at the curb. “All able-bodied personnel take a shift on security,” Kaufman said. “And they put you top of the list. You look like you know what you’re doing,” he added, with an appraising glance at Danny. They exited the lobby.

  Men and women were hunched inside the vehicles, a capacity crowd. Rifles and shotguns bristled between their knees. Kaufman kept up a steady patter on the way to the street: It wasn’t idle chat. He had information to convey as they crossed the plaza.

  “We go out in teams of five, one per vehicle. We have maps. Designated blocks. Each team takes its block and we put a man on every side of the block, with one man patrolling clockwise around it. We radio in after every rotation, and we switch off who’s doing the walking. Everybody gets some exercise. There are supposed to be shooters on the roofs all around, so if you call in a problem, the shooter goes to the nearest vantage point and covers your ass until backup shows up. If there’s no shooter in your position you deal with it. Tell you the truth there won’t be a shooter. Anybody that can shoot gets recruited by those Hawkstone vigilantes.”

  “Why don’t they patrol, too?” Danny asked, as they approached the vehicles. “They have the best gear. They have those Bradleys. They have the training.”