Rise Again Below Zero (13 page)

“Yeah, I’m immune. We’ve been over this before. It’s bullshit.”

“I almost lost it when the hunters attacked. There was so much blood. I just wanted to eat a little piece off one of the wounded. But I didn’t.”

“Wulf would have shot you down,” Danny muttered. “You so much as taste human flesh, that’s it. That’s our deal. That’s what makes you different from the rest of your kind. One bite and I treat you just like the rest of your kind.”

“You’re afraid,” Kelley observed. Danny glanced over at the sunglasses and saw only her reflection in them.

“Bullshit.”

“You are afraid of me,” Kelley persisted. “I can tell. Maybe it’s because I’m hungry like you’re thirsty. You should be able to understand that. Know how bad you want a drink? I want human meat a hundred times more. Maybe you can guess what it’s like.”

I need to stop drinking
, Danny thought. She never had a good enough reason, but by God, maybe this was it.

“When you came back, you were the same person, only undead,” Danny said, once the silence had gone on longer than she could bear. “But you’ve been changing. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You’re different now. I think you’re waiting for something.”

“Like an opportunity?”

“Well?”

“I
am
waiting. It’s true. But I don’t know what for.” She drew breath, her lungs deflated.

“I been thinking,” Danny continued, when Kelley didn’t respond. “What if we split up? What if you went somewhere on your own?”

“You said that would never happen again.”

“But one of these days, shit is going to go very wrong. Unless maybe we switch things up.”

“Or very right.”

“You mean like you’ll finally get to kill me?”

“That’s not . . .”

Kelley sounded uncertain for a moment. Her words trailed off, not for lack of air, but because she couldn’t frame her next thought. There was a clicking in her throat. Then, rolling out in a series of sharp breaths:

“. . . Has it ever occurred to you that the food chain just got longer, and I might be one link ahead of you? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe
my
kind is humanity, now? Huh? All this time I been rotting away at your side, not tasting what every goddamned fiber of my being craves as a fucking
favor
to you, and you have been acting like
you
are the boss. Like
you
are the last word. What if it’s not you? What if it’s me? What if this whole time I have been sitting here tolerating your anger and drunkenness and judgment because
I
am now the superior being, the one who sees the furthest and thinks the deepest and understands the way things are?”

Danny realized she hadn’t drawn breath herself in almost a minute.

“You want to eat people’s fucking skin and you think you’re the superior one? Jesus, Kelley. You were a haughty-ass child, but this is beyond that. At the very fucking best, you have a serious terminal disease than makes you a danger to yourself and others. At the very fucking best. At worst, you’re my tame fucking pet zombie and you exist at
my fucking pleasure!”

She hadn’t wanted to shout, but in the end Danny was raging, her spittle flecking the cracked windshield. Kelley was silent. Danny couldn’t tell if it was the silence of the undead, or the silence of Kelley, the girl who sulked a lot. She almost expected to be attacked. But nothing happened, and all her cruel words disappeared into the silence.

She might not have gotten so angry if she hadn’t half-believed what Kelley was proposing.

“Okay,” she said, when the rage had metabolized into ordinary heartburn. “Let’s say you’re Humanity Mark II or 2.0 or whatever. Why don’t you just try to kill me and we find out who’s superior?”

“There’s something I need to know,” Kelley said, speaking in a slow, deliberate voice, taking short breaths. “It’s the reason I remember who I am before I died, when most of my kind don’t. Is it just because the disease hits people in different ways, and that’s how I turned out? Is it because you were there, or because you said what you said?”

They drove past a three-car wreck from the early days of the crisis, the vehicles tangled together, rusting. Danny watched it recede into the distance in the wing mirror.

“What difference does that make?” Danny asked.

Kelley turned her head carefully, looked at Danny from behind the sunglasses.

“I woke up and there was only the hunger. I didn’t know who I was or what I had been. I just smelled this hot, spicy fresh meat. But you said something then. You didn’t know I had come back . . . and you were crying. You said ‘I love you.’ And it reminded me that I was something else before.” Kelley was out of air. She breathed again.

Danny felt a couple of hot tears spill down her dirty face. Her chin was quivering. To hear it from this thing that had once been her sister—the pain of that moment tore open again, bright and fresh.

Kelley was choosing her words one at a time. “I need to know if I am still that person. If I am your sister. Or if I’m something new, and what I was before doesn’t matter.”

Danny’s throat was constricted with grief, but she tried to sound matter-of-fact when she said, “What happens when you figure it out?”

“I kill you.”

A
s she sat beside her sister in the front of the police car, Kelley dwelled on the hunger.

Her putrid guts were squirming with it. She could smell the blood on her sister’s skin, smell the bacteria devouring the edges of her wounds. Inside that body there was hot, fresh meat, especially that beating heart, tough and rich. Her teeth would nearly break on it, but the muscle would yield at last, the blood would gush out of it in a stream that would fill her belly and spurt from her nostrils.

She wouldn’t care if her sister was screaming or fighting or begging for mercy when she did it. The triumph of a full belly, her zombie metabolism racing so that her
own
heart might beat more than once or twice a minute,
sensation returned to her limbs, body healing, the pain of starvation driven away—

She felt the bandages around her mouth grow gelatinous with thick saliva. She turned her thoughts away from the prey.
I love you,
Danny had said. And she continued to change Kelley’s bandages and clean her body when it obviously repulsed her to do so. Kelley herself would do nothing she didn’t wish to. Why would anyone do so? Living or dead, there were only needs and fulfillment of needs. Nothing else existed.

Or so it seemed to her. But the question itched at her hard-edged mind: Was there something more? If there were not, Danny would have destroyed her.

It was the riddle of the living. There was a kind of sacrifice in it, something beyond the self. The living version of Kelley would have said there was something greater in life just as there was something greater in a word than individual letters. But Kelley could no longer decipher written language, either. She felt an endless confusion that drove her thoughts in circles: She could not die, but she was lesser than the living. When she fed, it was the life in the rats and opossums and raccoons that sustained her, a spurt of electricity; but none of this mysterious element was manufactured inside her own body. It faded away as her digestion worked upon it. She felt empty, stagnant. The fire inside the living was what she most wanted, and the thing she couldn’t have. To consume it was to extinguish it. There was only the tantalizing taste for a few seconds. Now that she had accidentally tasted human blood, that desire filled her mind and body completely.

•   •   •

Kelley could not precisely remember the sensation of life, but there were things that survived the transition from life to undeath. These things remained with her as memories of someone else. None of her old tastes had survived. She didn’t care for grilled hot dogs with brown mustard anymore. It would have infuriated the living version of herself. As she now was, she didn’t care. It was inconvenient but not important. She felt like a shark that remembered another life as a human being. The taste of blood had made her want nothing more than to be just a shark, feeding, always feeding.

This was the torment of the thinkers, when they were not hungry. They were perfectly alone, no matter how many gathered together to hunt men. And lost, driven only by appetite. They scarcely knew who they were. Only
what they needed. Not long before, money had affected people like that, consuming the lives of the living. Never enough, every taste of the stuff making them want more. Making them forget who they were.

Then again—back in those days, nobody got paid for chewing the flesh off a human head.

•   •   •

Kelley clung to her relationship with Danny, such as it was, because it connected her to what she had been before. Now she was afraid that the hunger would replace everything she’d been clinging to. She had experienced a unique moment as she emerged from the brief sleep of natural death. It had shown her a lightning flash of her true self. Then it was gone. She sought to reclaim that light, to see the thing once more and take it back into herself. The hunger made it impossible even to conjure up in her mind.

Her thoughts moved at the same pace as before, but their purpose was different. Once, the future had occupied her attention; now there was only hunger or not-hunger, the two outcomes.

She had no use for abstractions anymore. Her thoughts were becoming more practical, more single-minded with every passing hour. Nothing should have intruded on her lust for bloody flesh.

But this one creature, her sister, was a riddle that she must answer. She was the key to what Kelley had become, the unbroken mirror in which she had glimpsed herself.

Kelley hoped she would understand soon, because the stench of her sister’s body renewed her hunger with every passing moment. And once again, her thoughts were upon the flavor of Danny’s blood, always circling.

T
he zeroes were getting thick. Swarming. There had been a city not far from the interstate, once a stop on the intercontinental railway and now a stop on the road. The area, as the earlier travelers had said, was worse than anywhere Danny had seen—and they were still only at the fringes of the
swarm. All moaners, at least so far. No hunters or thinkers, or the stupid zeroes would have avoided them.

Danny rolled the windows down an inch. Not enough to let any clutching hands in, but enough so that Kelley’s fishy, decayed smell was released outside the vehicle. It made the moaners recoil. They stumbled over each other to get out of the way.

Kelley’s words still rung in her ears. One of these days, probably soon, the hunger was going to get the better of her, and Kelley would try to kill Danny. She didn’t doubt it for a moment. The only real question was how long they had left together.

Topper called Danny on the radio, breaking the musty silence. “There’s too fuckin’ many, Sheriff. We’re gonna get knocked off our bikes. Over.”

“Copy,” Danny said. “Fall back and I’ll see how far we can go in the interceptor. If I fuck it up, you may need to shoot your way in to us, can you handle that, over?”

“Aye-aye,” Topper replied. “Over’n out.”

It was clear they wouldn’t be able to travel much farther. If the Chevelle and its truck had indeed come this way, they must also have avoided giving away their thinker scent; otherwise the roadway would be clear. But Danny didn’t see how they could have progressed through the swarm in this area by any other means. The moaners lurched around like gigantic, bipedal termites in a nest, moving in dense crowds, aimlessly, sometimes scattering until they were spread out, the way strangers spread out on train platforms, but eventually massing together again. Often they would crowd together until they were jammed cheek to rotten cheek.

She saw one with big yellowish knobs all over its exposed skin, like veiny mushrooms. There was another that looked like it had been shot in the face with raisins—they could almost have been huge blackheads, erupting through the gray flesh. Then they passed one with fleshy filaments growing out of its face, like that which had bitten Danny the previous night. It resembled a mask made of week-old hamburger. Most of the zeroes were clad in slack, dead skin of the usual kind, but these few stood out for their hideous originality. Maybe there were zero diseases going around. A whole new biology.