Rise Again Below Zero (51 page)

A
drenaline hit her veins like somebody was packing her entire body with ice. The area lights around the gate were nothing special, just outdoor fixtures of the type people put up over their garage doors. Several of them were motion-activated. Now they began to click on, casting light on the foremost of the undead.

Security around the gates had always been nominal, just for show; the real security was out in the badlands. Danny understood now where the acolytes had gone. They were out there in the wastes, breaking the thin line of defense. Now the moaners and hunters were on their way to the biggest human buffet this side of North America.

Danny shoved the gates closed. The locks had been cut open with bolt cutters, which lay on the pavement beside the nearest dead guard. Danny slung the broken chain around the frame of the two gates and jammed the cutters through the chain like a kind of steel clothespin. It would hold for a couple of minutes, no more. The entire road was filled with the undead, and their moans now drowned out the noise from downtown. As far as Danny’s eyes could see, extending out into the darkness on either side, there were thousands of zombies, rotten and damaged and hungry, many of them grotesquely diseased with knobs and filaments and warts bursting through their putrid skin. She could already smell them with fifty meters to spare.

Danny knelt beside the corpse of the guard. He had a walkie-talkie on his belt. She had to make a decision. Call in the situation and risk capture or summary execution, or let things happen as they would, resulting in the destruction of every living soul in town. It wasn’t a fair choice.

“Come in, somebody,” she said. “I’m at the town gates.”

“Who is this?” a male voice barked in response, fuzzy with static.

“This is the sheriff,” she said. “You’re looking for me. But you have a bigger problem. I’d deploy your entire force, right now, with everything you’ve got, to these gates. You have about ten thousand zeroes coming up the road.”

She dropped the radio on the ground. Snow immediately began to accumulate on it. It was going to be a serious storm.

The first of the zeroes reached the fence, a small male she took for a child at first, but it was an adult. It hissed at her, fingers hooked through the mesh of the fence. Another joined it, and then another, and she saw the wire bulge and ripple as they threw themselves at the barrier, driven by hunger. Already the headlights of one of the security vans were bouncing down the road—they had taken her warning seriously. Or they wanted to capture her while she was still there. She was sure they wouldn’t worry about her any longer once they saw what was coming.

But still, she ran alongside the fence and into the undergrowth. There was no point in getting shot along with the zeroes. No matter how far she ran, the undead were crashing into the fence. A pack of hunters, wizened and lean, were already halfway up the fence, the uppermost one of them tangled in the barbed wire at the top. It caught at the electrified strand and a spit of blue sparks followed it to the ground. The others snarled and snapped their jaws at Danny as she fleeted past.

She realized with a heavy certainty that whatever defense was to be made of Happy Town, she was going to be a part of it. The Silent Kid might be behind several near-impregnable barriers, but near wasn’t good enough. The sheer weight of the undead would take down every obstacle. She was going to have to defend the children until the flesh was torn from her bones.

•   •   •

The return through Happy Town was easy. Everyone with a firearm was heading toward the gates as further reports of the swarm began to spread. Danny simply kept to the side streets and made the distance unopposed as far as the central intersection in town. There she paused only to see what was happening; the Architect and his immediate staff were nowhere to be seen, but the lights were on inside the bank. Panic had gripped the chooks as word got around. Most of the civilians, as had been Danny’s experience throughout the crisis, fled at the first sign of trouble. So the streets were emptying out. Danny could not imagine how they thought a man-eating horde of the undead could be stopped by hiding under their beds. She spared a moment to think of her old friends. Patrick, Amy, Maria, so many others trapped in this shithole. She hadn’t seen some of them in a while. Maybe at least Patrick and Amy were out there in the world already, far from the swarm. But there were other swarms. Other places like Happy Town trading the illusion of safety for the certainty of imprisonment.

Good fucking luck,
Danny thought. That was as close to a prayer as she could manage.

Then she broke cover and sprinted up the street, heading straight for the fortified train station.

T
he guards had not left their posts. Danny was moving in the opposite direction of the tide—most people were fleeing into the suburbs or heading to the defense of the barrier. Word hadn’t spread far enough so that there was a mob at the station, but there would be, soon. It was going to make the evacuation of Saigon look like a bus queue.

She was counting on these guards not being a part of the teams that had been looking for her earlier; if she was proven wrong, she’d shoot them where they stood. She let her hand rest on her hip, casual to look at but only inches from the gun in her waistband.

“They need you at the perimeter fence,” Danny said to the foremost of the guards. There was snow settling on his shoulders.

“My orders—”

“There hasn’t been time for new orders,” Danny barked. “You got thousands of zeroes at the wire right the fuck now, soldier! Do you hear them?”

The uncanny sound of the swarm reached all the way to the mountain. She saw recognition and disbelief in his face. The guard looked to his fellows on the other side of the first, lowest barrier to the station. They didn’t give him any clues.

“I’ll go see,” he said, and trotted down the street.

Danny wasted no time. The rest of the guards wouldn’t be so easy. There were six men at the second barrier, and she couldn’t see how many beyond that. They had fully automatic weapons and they were nervous. Danny didn’t have any authority here, and they could even discover she’d been the enemy a few minutes earlier.

“We need to mount a solid defense,” she said, her voice hard and loud, in order-delivering mode. “You’re going to have every civilian in town trying to get on this train within ten minutes, when those gates go down.
I’m talking about ten fucking battalions of the ugliest zeroes you have ever seen, and they are
hungry
. Moaners and hunters. There are two things going to keep them from overrunning this town. Firepower and thinkers. There are thinkers here, but not enough.
Do you understand me?”

Several of the men nodded; one even said, “Yes, ma’am.” But none of them moved. She had to feed them every damn thing, apparently. Already there was screaming from the far end of town, muffled by the heavy snowfall, but still unmistakable. Raw terror. The zeroes must have gotten through.

“You hear that? I want every one of you to take up a defensive position above arm’s reach, you copy? Get up out of reach. Bring all the ammo, food, and water you can get your hands on, because that may be all you ever fucking get. We are going to mount a defense of this station. There are two enemies: panicked civilians and zeroes. You want the civilians on this side of the third fence, no matter what, because if they overrun the train, the children die. Are we clear?”

Nobody spoke. They were probably still trying to decide whether to shoot her.

“Are we clear?”

There was an explosion off in the distance. The snow falling from the sky lit up. That did the trick. The men scrambled from their positions, running to collect their gear. Danny only hoped they weren’t running away entirely. She wanted one of those rifles.

•   •   •

She knew it was the perfect storm. Panic spreads asymmetrically. It’s driven by what people can see and hear, not by information. People would freeze if they
heard
something like marching feet or engines approaching, losing precious seconds while they listened to determine which way the sound was traveling and ascertain what made it. They would run immediately if they
saw
something happen, always directly away from the thing they feared. People who hadn’t seen or heard would often run in the direction of danger, to witness it for themselves. Others would join the panic and run, but in a random direction because they didn’t know the source of the threat.

Danny wanted to get through the barriers and find the children, extract the Silent Kid from among the rest, and have him at her side while she did what she could to defend him. But it wouldn’t work. In practice, you couldn’t pick one kid and abandon the rest. So instead she scaled the quaint railroad props left on the station deck, barrels and crates stacked up almost
to the eaves. She hooked a leg over the wooden gutter and almost fell—the snow and ice made the shingles as slick as soap, and the heavy pack overbalanced her. But she clung to the gutter and shifted her weight by main force. She was on the roof. Already the first of the guards were coming back, laden with gear. And they had men and women with them. The laborers, Danny guessed, who were quartered behind the barriers. People with strong arms. They would have to do.

She risked getting to her feet, her boots shuddering on the snow. They still didn’t realize she had no authority here.

“Okay, listen up!” she shouted, and thirty or forty faces looked up. “Anybody who doesn’t have a firearm, get one. If you can’t get a firearm, find a weapon. Shovels, hammers, axes. Anything. You don’t have to take the zeroes down, do you hear me?”

“Who the fuck are you?” one man shouted.

“I am the person who stands between you assholes and death,” Danny said, and continued without missing another beat: “You don’t have to take them down. You only have to break their jaws. If they can’t bite, they can’t kill. Are you hearing me?”

“What’s happening?” a woman shouted.

Danny was glad she was on the roof, now. She had command of the situation. But more than that, she had a hell of a view down the main street.

“The town is about to be overrun by zeroes,” Danny replied. “That’s it. That’s the situation.”

“What happened at the church?” a man called, from the back of the group. As he spoke, another dozen workers appeared, coming through the heaviest of the fences. Danny observed they left the fortified gate open behind them.

“Unrelated incident,” Danny said. She had every reason not to get into that subject. “We have five minutes to set up these perimeters for defense. No more. Pile up anything you can get your hands on across this gap. I want the doors and windows of this building barricaded with enough shit to keep a tyrannosaur out. Those of you with guns, get up top of something so you have a field of fire. The rest of you man the barricades and bust the head of any motherfucker that comes near.”

“What about the noncombatants?” one of the guards said. He was among those Danny had seen when she arrived.

“Tell them to head for the river. Anything as long as they don’t overrun this position.”

In fact, Danny had no idea what to do about the civilians. They were going to hit the barriers faster than the undead. And now that they could hear the moaning of the undead coming up the main street, they were on their way.

•   •   •

Danny’s vantage point on the station roof gave her an axial view down the entire length of town. She could see the back of the bank, with the crooked church and the headless bronze soldier beyond it. A flood of terrified people was coming straight up the road. They might not have thought of the train as a means of escape yet; so far they were simply running away from the danger. But the moment the train turbines started up, there was going to be a riot.

A ladder clattered against the eaves of the roof; a window opened in the charming cupola of the station. Men and women swarmed onto the roof, dragging all kinds of materiel behind them. Danny saw several rocket launchers and bristling armloads of guns. Cases of ammunition. One of the men, sixtyish with a salt-and-pepper mustache, slipped his way along the ridgeline of the roof and shook Danny’s hand.

“I don’t know who the hell you are,” he said, “but welcome aboard.”

His name was Mickey Orlando, he was ex-Navy, and he knew a Marine when he saw one. That was all the conversation they had time for. Then Danny was shouting orders down at the people on the ground and Mickey was organizing the defenses on the roof. Somebody slipped and fell over the edge and broke something, but otherwise they were working with the desperate calm of people with no alternative.

Then the civilians arrived.

Fifty people became a hundred, and a hundred became two hundred, shouting in fear and demanding to know what was being done to secure their safety and the safety of the children. Somebody handed Danny a bullhorn. She slid down to the edge of the roof, wet slush clinging to her boots, and clicked it on.

“You need to remain calm,” she began, and nobody heard her amplified voice. She reached out to Mickey, indicating his AR-15. He handed it to her. She fired a burst of five rounds into the sky, and the crowd settled down enough so she could hear the brass jingling to the ground below.