Rise Again Below Zero (28 page)

“You’re a crazy person,” Vaxxine said, as Danny handed supplies up to her and she relayed the boxes into the back compartment of the cab.

Danny spat on the pavement. “He said we were welcome any time. I’m not following him there sight unseen. You have no idea how much trouble their so-called system has caused. What we do is ease up on the place quietly and scope it out, and then decide what to do. Recon.”

That was true as far as it went, but Danny had another concern: The Tribe was probably there by now. That was a confrontation she wasn’t prepared to have. And there was the matter of the Silent Kid. She wasn’t handing him over to a bunch of strangers just because they claimed to have Disneyland open again.

While they were talking, Danny was keeping an eye on the nearest zeroes; as long as they were shambling toward the living, the situation was in control. But when she saw them scent the air like dogs and then scatter back toward the tall grass, she knew they were out of time.

“Hunters,” she said. “Over there somewhere. Let’s get buttoned up fast.”

She tossed up the last of the boxes and climbed into the cab of the truck herself. A few seconds later the massive power plant roared into operation and they were rolling away from the lonely hospital out in the middle of the plains. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw three hunters, crouched like spiders, rush out of the fields after the rig. They didn’t stand a chance of catching up, but the sight of the things always made Danny’s flesh crawl. You could never relax. You could never let your guard down. She hoped the young doctor, Joe, knew what he was doing out there in this merciless world.

But there was a great deal of news to think over. Happy Town
was
a real place, apparently, somewhere in the badlands. The train line went there. Danny’s theory was correct. And the motive behind all the kidnappings was confirmed. Vaxxine’s thoughts were moving in the same direction, because they hadn’t been driving for long when she said, “You’re not stupid. We’ll do it your way. We look the town over from a distance and suss it out, see if it’s really as safe as all that. If it’s cool, we go in. But we don’t want to wait too long. Things have this way of changing.”

“You can go in ahead if you want. Find yourself a spare kid, but you can’t have mine.”

“I’m not worried about me. But if they really do have a brain-scanning machine, you should get yourself checked out,” Vaxxine said.

“Thanks, Mom. Listen. There’s shit you don’t know. I didn’t bring it up with Dr. Joe there, but I have excellent reason to believe thinkers—the smart zombies—are kidnapping kids, too. But they’re not eating them right away. So ask yourself: Why would thinkers do that? Why would they collect a bunch of kids they can’t eat at once?”

“They’re smart,” Vaxxine said without hesitation. “They’re storing food.”

“Food they have to feed and keep warm? Doesn’t make sense. They’re better off letting the living do that. Then they can dive in and grab the young whenever they want.”

“Maybe people got too good at defending themselves against those attacks.”

Danny took that personally. The Tribe had suffered two devastating assaults within hours of each other. And it was supposed to have exceptionally good defenses, as traveling groups went. Yet they’d gotten their asses handed to them on a plate, one cheek at a time.

“I wish,” was all she said.

An unhappy silence settled on the group. At length, Vaxxine looked behind her at the Silent Kid, who sat on the floor behind the seats with his dog in his lap, his face as grave as Buster Keaton’s. “They prefer to eat kids who talk,” Vaxxine said to him. “You’re probably okay.”

“I have two theories,” Danny said, picking up where she’d left off. “First, the thinkers plan to use the kids for ransom somehow, and they need a lot of them to make it pay off. Second, they want to infiltrate this Happy Town. They can pass for living, you know. Sometimes.”

“That’s like . . . really paranoid,” Vaxxine observed.

“There has to be a reason everybody is kidnapping children all of a sudden. The living and undead at the same time.”

“Coincidence.”

“Coincidence,” Danny said, “is what a conspiracy looks like from the outside.”

T
hey drove for half of the day, slowed down by some bad sections of road Joe hadn’t thought to mention. The storm clouds were stretched from one side of the sky to the other, and the daylight had turned to burnished silver. There was a sick, greenish cast to the clouds. The wind had died down entirely. Vaxxine stopped to fuel up alongside an abandoned big rig with a carload full of athletic shoes behind it; she had a system for that, too, but Danny jumped in without asking and took the process over, shoving a garden hose down into the tanks and pumping it out with a rotary pump that Vaxxine kept under her seat.

They were on an elevated section of road with a city three or four kilometers away; there was light industrial sprawl around their position, and Danny could see a couple of zeroes making their way in her direction, picking
their way through the debris of a street that appeared to have been bombed. It would take them half an hour. The Silent Kid watched everything she did, moving from window to window of the truck, pressing his nose to the glass. His dog did the same, but looked mostly at the crows circling underneath the clouds, not at Danny.

Rain came down in fits. Danny got back into the cab a few seconds before the downpour began. It was icy-cold and the windows of the cab fogged up; Vaxxine started the engine and ran the air conditioner to clear the glass. The zeroes down below them among the warehouses were invisible, so dense was the rain; Danny had seen their kind take shelter before. Was that an instinct, or was it a practical matter? Did it accelerate decay? Did it ruin their sense of smell?

They decided to wait out the storm, or until it looked like the undead were getting too thick for safety. Elevated roadways were usually fairly secure, however, because there weren’t many footpaths that led to them—only on-ramps and off-ramps, and miles of barricades at the sides. So they sat and listened to the thrumming of rain on the cab, watched the eels of water writhing down the window glass, and eventually the Silent Kid fell asleep with his dog tucked up against his chest. The rain seemed to be increasing in savagery, as if the sky intended to wash the vile world beneath it clean.

“How did you get out of that hotel?” Danny asked, after they had sat without speaking for a quarter of an hour.

“My God, you were listening to all that talk?”

“It’s interesting. Most people didn’t escape the cities if they didn’t bug out in the first few minutes. And no offense, but you’re not exactly set up for escapes.”

“You underestimate the power of wheels, Baby Love. Ten days I was in that bloody closet. It had been dead quiet for three of those, but I was too scared to come out. But I felt like my kidneys were going to fail and the stink was something awful, so eventually I opened the door and peeked out. Oh, the stink was even worse out there! Corpses all around the place, some of them all blood with big pieces missing and some had black on them like ink, which I later sorted out was the difference between someone who died alive and someone who died after death, zombielike.

“It was no easy thing to get out of there with all the limbs and bodies on the floor, but I made my way, using a mop handle to push me a path. Then one of the things I thought was dead, it kind of twitched upright and looked
right at me with those eyes like pieces of sushi meat. Zeroed in like a hawk. It was getting up and I just wheeled out the doors as fast as I could, and that’s when I saw they were all about the place, the ones that weren’t dead, or undead, or what you will, but had only been like resting while they waited for something to eat.

“I got out onto the street and pointed myself down the hill toward the Miracle Mile—you know how steep it is there, practically straight down—and rolled as fast as I could. Blistered my hands trying to brake so I wouldn’t kill myself. I must have hit thirty miles an hour, and I was zigzagging all over trying to keep away from the monsters and not to hit any of the cars and the wreckage, it was everywhere you know. And right then when I thought for sure I was going to wipe out and die, be torn apart, this beautiful feeling came over me. Because it was the same as the last time I went down the mountain on my skis, this feeling like the wind was going straight through my body and I didn’t weigh anything, I was flying, you know?

“I was so frightened, and at the same time I felt like God Himself was pushing me along, his hands on me. I don’t remember if I was screaming or laughing, but for one minute I felt like I felt before, and this time I didn’t break my back. I came to a stop down on Santa Monica Boulevard, I think it was, and I couldn’t get the chair to slow down properly because my hands were so bloody they wouldn’t grip. Now, this chair has a little motor, mostly to go up and down, but it will drive along real slow, so I motored until the battery died and there weren’t so many zeroes there. But they surrounded me eventually. Came out of the shadows and oozing up out of cars and from piles of corpses. And I wanted to die somehow, but there wasn’t any way I could think of before they got me.

“But that’s when somebody came up in a van. I survived because somebody saved me. We made it out of the city, five of us, but then they right away left me because I’d just be a burden. They left me at an old folks’ home in the desert, where I found this leg-free driving rig on a car, and a lot of my supplies came from there, too. But you know what? I wasn’t hurt by their going and leaving me like that. You know what hurt?”

“Your hands?”

“What hurt was that somebody
saved
me. I wanted to survive all by myself, and now I do. But I’m tired. I’m alone and tired. Whatever I had to prove, there’s no point proving it just to myself.”

Danny thought about that. It reminded her of her own determination to go back to the Tribe. “I wouldn’t give up what you got here,” she said. “You
might want a partner, but you don’t need to get involved with a big group. I been doing that since the beginning and it was always a pain in my ass. This is better. Less is more.”

“Are you volunteering?”

Danny shrugged. “No. Nothing personal. I gotta figure out what to do with this kid, and there’s some unfinished business out there. But you’re independent as fuck like you are now. Join up with some happy assholes in a big group, and you’ll turn back into the handicapped gimp they don’t want to deal with. You’re kicking ass with both hands. Don’t give that up.”

Danny felt irritation bubbling up like hot tar inside her head. She wasn’t accustomed to making long speeches and she didn’t like to talk about abstractions like personal freedom. She dealt with concrete things, action. This conversation smelled like philosophy. And she didn’t like how disappointed Vaxxine had looked when she said “no” to the idea of teaming up. But why the hell would anybody want to team up with Danny?

Of course, Vaxxine hadn’t heard the story about Kelley, and Danny resolved never to mention it.

Vaxxine was about to respond, both of them now staring out their side windows in opposite directions, when the rain abruptly stopped. Now they made eye contact. It was weird: The sky turned the color of spoiled meat, an iridescent green, and the rain fell away as if a faucet had been turned off. They could feel the barometric pressure change inside their ears, as if aboard an aircraft descending rapidly. The Silent Kid woke up and looked around, blinking, and his pup stopped snoring, yawned, and pressed his stub of nose to the glass, staring out at the dripping gray world.

The clouds overhead looked strange, drooping in heavy globs like milk poured into a tank of water, knuckled and eerie. The air was absolutely still. Danny lowered her window and checked the flanks of the truck for any zeroes that might have crept up on them while they waited out the storm.

“Mind if I get out on the hood?” she asked.

“Don’t scratch the paint,” Vaxxine said, unconsciously placing a hand on the Silent Kid’s head. There was a dense, airless feeling of foreboding that came not from inside them, but from the sky. Danny climbed out the window and onto the hood of the engine. The roof was too steep to stand on; she’d have preferred the extra few feet. But the nose of the truck was plenty high. She didn’t have any of her best gear: no binoculars, only her sidearm and what had been in her belt and in her munitions backpack. But the air had become warm, oppressive, yet uncannily clear. She could see for
miles. The rainstorm was like a seething curtain blowing rapidly away across the city, then trailing its tattered shrouds out across the distant plains; it moved faster than any front Danny had ever seen.

The strange clouds hung so low she felt she could rip them open with a stick held over her head.

Then there was a sound—it could have been whale song or the mourning of giants. Deep, bone-stirring sound. And several of the roots of the clouds began to descend. A million snakes were hissing in the air—nasty secrets being told by a multitude of voices all at once. Then a gust whipped past and nearly tossed Danny to the ground. She looked down below their elevated roadway and saw the grid below them was now crawling with zeroes, driven from hibernation by the storm. They squirmed like maggots.