Rise Again

by Ben Tripp

  When Danny came to a stop she was sprawled on her back on the chipped concrete train platform. Ten yards away, the ASV was completing its second barrel-roll down the embankment. It landed upside-down, squarely on its roof, the turret jammed into the buckled cement like some apocalyptic electrical appliance plugged into the earth. The astonishing thing was, the machine appeared to be undamaged. It had rolled twice in twenty vertical feet down the steep embankment, and yet looked very much like all that was required was a tow truck to get it upright again, and it could roll away intact.

  Danny hoped the fuckers inside were dead, but she couldn’t count on that. And they weren’t trapped. The thing had hatches and doors all over it. Danny had to get to a weapon, fast, before they could emerge.

  She stood up, and if she’d been in a better frame of mind she would have been pleased at the discovery that her limbs were mostly still working. She had thrown herself out of a speeding car and was pretty much uninjured. Except for her hand-stump, which was in trouble. The pain from that was so gigantic it was like the sound of a jackhammer: The ears went deaf from it. Her nerves were deaf from the shouting in her arm. Danny limped away down the platform, heading for the stairs.

  Then she saw them. Three hunters, peering down over the embankment. They were watching her.

  Two more appeared, one of them creeping forward onto the embankment in full view. They were getting bolder. Danny heard rustling in the bushes where the embankment became hillside again. It was time to move fast.

  Danny decided she didn’t want to go back up to Main Street after all. She ran across the platform for the dusty train, closed herself in one of the passenger cars, crouched as low as she could, and ran to the far end of the car, then slipped out the opposite door on the desert side.

  She climbed down to the ground. Then she limped along the tracks as fast as her aching limbs would take her, until Potter was out of view around a long, geometric curve in the tracks that skirted the knee of a hulking rock formation. After a while she was tired and light-headed.

  She had made some distance, she thought. Danny sat down between the scorching hot rails, a small dark shape in the flat white salt of the desert. She let her finger-stumps dribble blood on the iron of the rail. It sizzled and evaporated into little rusty coins with dark edges. The sun heliographed cryptic messages on the backs of her eyeballs. Did what I could, she thought.

  Then she fell over on her side and was still.

  7

  Murdo was the only one left alive. Estevez’s skull was crushed; Parker’s head was twisted almost back-to-front. Murdo found it ironic that Parker’s enormous neck had failed him. They were all in a jumble in the upside-down cockpit of the ASV. Murdo’s rage was gone; now he was only afraid. He didn’t know how Ace or Reese or Flamingo were doing, but maybe they were okay. He needed some help. Still, his luck was holding up pretty well. He had some bruises, a couple of cuts, sure. But he had survived. He was the survivor of all survivors, was Murdo.

  He reached down for the toggles that opened the roof hatch—now a floor hatch in the inverted vehicle. Something banged on the hull outside the ASV. Murdo shifted his weight and looked out the small front window. And his blood turned to snow. Outside there were four of the quick undead, the hunters he’d seen. They were right there, trying to figure out a way into the ASV. Murdo panicked. Bone-tipped fingers scratched at the bulletproof glass, digging along the edge of the panels. Could they get in through the turret? He drew his sidearm and crawled back to look, banging his knees. He had to crawl over Estevez’s stinking corpse. There was daylight under there, but the turret opening was jammed right into the pavement. He was safe inside the ASV. He sat and waited. Time stopped going by. It waited with him. He listened to the claws scratching at the hull.

  There were more of them now, expressionless faces looking in with their lipless beaver teeth. They wanted him. They couldn’t have him. He was secure inside his castle.

  But Parker might come back to life. Murdo hadn’t thought of that. Estevez was thoroughly dead, because his brains were showing. But Parker could maybe reanimate. Maybe.

  Murdo put his pistol to Parker’s head and fired. The noise was sharp as a spike. Blood and brain matter sprayed all over everything. He should have planned it better. Murdo settled back again. He would wait. It was getting hotter and hotter inside the ASV, but he would wait.

  Hawkstone would send people back to look for them, eventually. He could drink his own urine. Even eat Estevez jerky, if he had to. Stay alive. Survive and thrive.

  There were dozens of the things outside now. They were scrambling all over the exterior of the ASV, but they couldn’t find a way in. So many of them were on the hull that the whole vehicle shifted slightly, its equilibrium changing. The turret grated loudly on the concrete. Slender, leathery fingers slipped through the spaces where there was a gap between turret and pavement. The light flickered as their shadows fell around the plugged-up opening. They were exploring. Murdo didn’t think they could dig their way in. He’d shoot them if they tried it, and if he ran out of bullets he’d crush their skulls.

  He was fine. He could wait.

  He crouched there in the dim, stifling cockpit, his knees drawn up, trying not to look at the wizened, hungry faces that crowded the windows, the bony fingers groping around the edges of the turret.

  He would wait forever, if he had to.

  8

  Wulf shot Reese.

  The Hawkstone mercenary had been perched on the roof of the RV, watching the progress of his comrades through binoculars. He had no idea that Danny’s entire squad of hardened survivors was behind him, watching him in turn from vantage points up the hill. Gunfire erupted down in Potter, and Reese picked up his AR-15 rifle. He put the scope to his eye, searching for targets. Wulf figured Danny had enough going on without additional crossfire from above. So he tucked the beloved Winchester under his hairy cheek and shot Reese through the pelvis. The man dropped and rolled off the roof of the motor home, thudding flat on the pavement. He tried to crawl under the machine. Wulf shot him again, but Reese was still moving.

  “You’re losing your touch, old-timer,” Topper remarked.

  “You in some kind of fuckin’ hurry?” Wulf retorted. “I’m just taking my time.”

  They found Jones asleep in the back of the White Whale. Wulf was all for skinning him alive. “He’s almost human,” Patrick protested. “This isn’t his fault.”

  Patrick convinced the others to let Jones live. Jones would certainly have died, if not for Wulf’s deliberate approach to mortally crippling Reese. Even Topper, who wanted revenge with an all-consuming thirst, was taken aback by that.

  Once Jones was bound up on the floor, the men fired up the engine and took the motor home through town, searching for survivors. The undead hunters seemed to have gone away, although the crows were still aloft.

  Eventually they found Amy and Michelle, Jimmy James and Becky (clutching the very quiet baby). They were hiding in a fuel storage shed where presumably the stink of kerosene was sufficient to conceal their presence. Once safe inside the Whale, Becky confessed she was prepared to strangle the baby if he had made any noise while they were hiding. Then she wept and squeezed him and woke the baby up. When they motored back up to the crest of the hill, Maria came running out of a small house with a concrete Virgin Mary out front; she had fled there from her own hiding place while the rest of them were searching for survivors in town. That was everybody there was. Pfeiffer and the others were gone, presumably butchered.

  Of Danny Adelman there was no sign.

  Patrick couldn’t bear the idea of leaving town without knowing. He wanted to look with their big telescope, to search all of Potter door-to-door.

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Topper said. “Whole new ballgame. There are fast zombies out there, smart as coyotes. We don’t fuck with that.”

  “Let’s at least get up on the hill and see what we can see,” Patrick said.

  “It’
s open ground,” Troy observed. “Let’s do what Patrick says. If those things try to get after us, we’ll see ’em coming and we’ll split.”

  They agreed to delay for twenty minutes. Wulf and Patrick climbed up on the roof of the RV and watched. Wulf was looking for zombies. Patrick was looking for Danny.

  They sat up there, baking in the sun, for the better part of half an hour, squinting through telescope and rifle sight.

  “I see some of them things down there,” Wulf said, breaking the silence. “Down by the train station.”

  “Is Danny—” Patrick said.

  “Well I can’t read their fuckin’ nametags from here,” Wulf explained. Then, after another pause, “No, she ain’t. It’s zeros. They’re trying to get into that big old personnel carrier. It’s upside-down. Fuckers must still be alive inside it. Guess that’s why we had town to ourselves—they got themselves a box lunch.”

  Another ten minutes went by. It was time to pull out, but Patrick begged two more minutes. Wulf was getting agitated. He stank like a polecat in heat.

  “I can’t see ’em anywhere else, man.”

  “So what,” Patrick said, disappointment giving way to anger.

  “The enemy you can’t see is the enemy that kills you,” Wulf said.

  “Oh.”

  “That ain’t good,” Wulf added.

  Patrick was so patently uninterested that Wulf started looking all around them, making a production of it, so it would be obvious they were about to be ambushed on all sides. Then he stopped—having seen something for real—and his big, bowed shoulders locked tight. Patrick saw the change in him.

  “Are they ambushing us?” he whispered, suddenly frightened.

  “Somebody’s down there. Gimme that.” Wulf handed Patrick his rifle and took the telescope.

  He sighted it out into the white, featureless plain of the desert, along the shore of which ran the railway.

  “How the fuck do you focus this thing…I got it, get your hands off.” Wulf went silent, then emitted a long, wet whistle, watching the desert through the eyepiece.

  “Well, goddamn. I found your girlfriend.”

  9

  All I ever do is wake up hurting, Danny thought. And then she woke up.

  1

  The convoy rolled out every morning at first light. They shared watches in the nights, keeping to the wide-open places where there was no cover for stalking and creeping and slinking up. The White Whale took center position, with a tail of whatever vehicles they’d picked up along the way straggling out behind, sometimes joining the convoy for a few miles before turning off on their unknown errands, sometimes tagging along for days. A few stayed. Out front were the riders, the men on their rumbling bikes. A dangerous way to travel, but they were the eyes and ears. They could smell things, too, and darted like bees into the promising flowers to see if there was nectar to be had: big-box stores with cracked parking lots from which weeds and bushes were beginning to rise. Downtowns of lost villages. Sometimes long roads that left the main ways and disappeared into mountains or valleys, where small populations of men could still be found, living in ways their ancestors would have understood. Close to the land. No longer the top of the food chain.

  In the lead of the convoy, before even the bikers, was the interceptor. It was the third and best of them so far. They had the construction of the exoskeleton sorted out. It was rigid but didn’t add too much weight. The front fender was a wedge of steel with teeth cut into its leading edge; this caught the zeros and pulled them under the vehicle rather than throwing them up over the hood. Frames strung with piano wire protected the windows.

  Sheriff Adelman rode up there in the interceptor. Sometimes she would take a passenger, Patrick or Doctor Amy or one of the other long-timers, but often she drove on alone, the wind rustling the choppy red hair beneath her Smokey hat. She seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of those hats.

  The convoy foraged to survive. There was so much unconsumed stuff out there in the countryside, food and supplies and needed things all embalmed in preservatives, bound in plastic and vacuum packs and cans and packets, hermetically sealed so it stayed good for damn near ever, regardless of the “use by” date on the bottom. Those dates were slipping behind them now. You could get laid for a piece of fruit. Fresh things were best, but Adelman had her rules. You rode with her, you lived by them. They didn’t touch orchards or crops, unless they were clearly abandoned. Thou shalt not fuck up anybody else. Sometimes they bartered with the brave souls who stayed put to grow things. In addition, they didn’t kill unless killed at, as some put it. They didn’t take what wasn’t offered—whether it was sex or a jar of pickles. These weren’t complicated rules. If you broke them, you got left behind. A fate worse than death.

  There were troubles all over the land. It was like the Old West. Some folks took wild. They drove around raiding the fastnesses people had built up against the zeros. No matter how clever the monsters got, they were never as cunning or dangerous as men. Men could light fires and build ladders. They could throw grappling hooks and wield knives; they could pretend to be scared, beg for help, then slaughter the men and rape the women dead.

  The undead were getting smarter, but they couldn’t think the way men could. Tools were unknown to them, and language. They formed packs, hunting and feeding together and killing the slow, stupid zeros if they found them. They didn’t breed. There were no alpha males or queens. They were all the same, eating machines that knew how to encircle and rush their prey and nothing more. Eventually their clothes rotted off. The ones that fed often, didn’t decay. The ones that fell on lean times withered. If they withered enough, the dull spark that animated them went out and they died for good.

  Their numbers were legion.

  Dying was complicated. But the rules for dying were simple. You had a choice. If you wanted to, you could live out your life to its last natural moment. After, when you opened your undead eyes, they shot you in the head. Or, if you knew your time was coming, you could have somebody shoot you while you were still alive. It was called “sending you back.” Being asked to do the shooting was considered a great honor. Sheriff Adelman got asked to send a lot of folks back. She never did. Nothing personal to the dying, of course. They didn’t take it hard. The third way to die, which took a certain amount of chutzpah, was to shoot yourself. They called that “warrior style.” You got extra points for shooting yourself.

  2

  Five months after the crisis began, the world was different. It was greener. Mankind’s stiff-arm distance from other forms of life had been relaxed. Small trees and grass and flowers grew through the cracks in the ocean of asphalt laid down by an ambitious species without a long-term plan. Animals roamed freely, their keen senses adapted to keeping them away from the undead. The skies were blue again over the cities. Great skylines of architecture had been blunted down, felled by fire and warmaking, these sand-castle ruins subsequently flattened by epic rains that came that first winter. An earthquake—probably the Big One, except nobody measured it—sank San Francisco halfway into the bay. Men saw the cities fall, but did not care. Fewer places for death to lie in wait.

  Nobody knew how many living human beings were left. The rest of the world was once more out of reach, a frightening place where mariners touched the fringes of land, then sailed on. There were stories of everywhere and news from nowhere. There was no internet, no telephone. Satellite communications were mostly lost: The ground systems required to track and maintain orbits had gone offline, and attempts to restore them failed because the satellites were lost in the sky. Many of those had already fallen.

  Some said China was almost intact and planning to invade the globe. The Living Death was of Chinese manufacture. That’s why you never saw Chinese zeros. Others said the disease had come from the mass graves in Haiti, extracted by Nazi extremists planning to raise the Fourth Reich. Some said the American government had come up with the plague as a way to reinstate its crumbling empire. It was all bull
shit and conjecture, idle talk to fill the hours of wakefulness before the sun came up.

  The zeros seemed to have reached their zenith. Their evolution peaked with the discovery that window glass could be broken with a stone. Had they continued to improve their intelligence and skill, had they been able to think, mankind would already have been extinct. Everyone agreed with that.

  Now mankind was engaged in a game of keep-away. If men could stop getting eaten for long enough, the zeros would rot away. The difficulty was men kept getting eaten. The monsters remained prosperous, after their fashion. They felt no cold in winter, unless they froze, in which case they were finished; sometimes in the snow season men would find ghouls in nests, hundreds strong, huddled in stinking cellars where the things waited out the storms like huge, wingless bats. Their survival strategies seemed based on instincts dead for a million years in mortal men. They endured no pain, no fear, felt nothing but insatiable hunger; their self-interest extended only as far as the feast. They did not need to think.

  Men, meanwhile, had begun thinking again in earnest.

  Danny’s Tribe moved slowly across the country. They weren’t going anywhere in particular—the idea was simply to keep on going. They stayed sometimes in a promising place for a week at a time, then traveled on; once they spent a month near the cracked and overflowing Hoover Dam. There was always something to move their band along. The zeros would get thicker in the area, or the survivors would hear rumors of an army of men coming, cannibals that styled themselves after the undead, or destroyers, or zealots.

  The zealots angered Danny the most. The destroyers were hordes of nihilistic gangs that wrecked and killed and burned because, in their estimation, what was left of the world was trash anyway. They engaged the zeros in pitched battles and helped feed their numbers, suffering bites and infections that left the dying scattered along the roads. When Danny found them, they would be taken in and cared for until it was time to make The Choice. The rest wandered off to die, and came back ravening.