Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  Most of all, Mike wished he could explain himself, or better yet, excuse himself and get the hell out of there. His first impressions of the Tribe were not positive. A lot of hard, unforgiving faces. These people took their cues from the top, and consequently they all displayed a little of the sheriff’s badass swagger. After his capture he’d listened to them demanding he be executed to make an example for others who came along that road, and he’d tried to think of what to say that might cause them to spare his life. He’d tried to explain how there was a safe place only a few days to the east, a safe place where they could live themselves, and send the children somewhere even safer. They’d called him ugly names. Then the sheriff had reasserted command of the situation, marked him as hers to decide on, as surely as a panther marks its prey. Since then there had only been the mean stares.

  The folding doors bumped open. Mike flinched. He’d been lost in thought; it was like waking up suddenly. For a long moment nobody came up the steps of the bus, and he wondered if someone was playing a trick on him. Then a small head peeked around the kick panel between the seats at the bus entry. It was that kid the bikers had brought back earlier in the day. Despite his nerves, Mike could relish the irony. If he’d kept on driving a while instead of making a run on the convoy, he might have seen this kid himself. And he could have taken him away, penalty-free. Nobody would ever doubt he was doing something good-hearted, in fact, even if it did happen to get Mike himself to safety as well. Instead he’d tried to grab one of the Tribe’s kids and now he was on two hundred shit lists.

  The dark humor of the thing evaporated when Mike realized what must be happening. The kid aboard the shuttle was a decoy. They were going to set him up and kill him, using the boy as an excuse. Mike turned his eyes firmly away—there wasn’t anything else he could do, chained up as he was. He kept his eyes fixed on his own reflection in the back window, a steely outline filled in by darkness.

  The boy didn’t say anything. Mike had heard him referred to by some of the others as the Silent Kid, so this wasn’t a surprise. But he could see the child advancing down the aisle behind him in the reflection. And through the reflection he could see the light of the shuttle falling on faces outside, watching at a distance. Angry, flat eyes and thin-set mouths. They were watching to see what happened. Maybe they considered this kid to be expendable. What did they think, that he was one of those child-cannibals or something?

  The kid stopped two rows of seats away and stared at Mike. His small dog came along behind him but stayed well away from the stranger, preferring to shiver and flex his ears up and down in an anxious manner. Mike stared at the reflection, which the kid didn’t seem to notice. They stayed like that for a long time, until Mike felt a serpent of icy sweat running down his neck.

  Then a singsong voice cried out, “There you are!”

  A moment later the Tribe’s Dr. Amy came bustling aboard, followed by the blond man, Patrick, whose face looked like it had been pretty badly smashed at some point. The thick features didn’t match his willowy build. He was missing some teeth. The Silent Kid turned to look at them, but Mike kept his eyes averted. This could all be part of their sting operation.

  “Hey, kidnapper guy. Did anybody feed you yet?” Amy continued. Mike had met her when she’d splinted his foot shortly after his capture; it hurt abominably but she’d done a good job of immobilizing it, so the pain was more of a dull roar than a series of sharp crescendos.

  “My name is Mike,” he replied, still keeping his face to the window.

  “That was it,” Amy said. “Also, if you have to do a number one or two now is kind of a good time.”

  “God, he’s not an infant,” Patrick said. Mike knew his name because he’d assisted Dr. Amy with his foot. “Do you need anything?” he added, addressing Mike. “The sheriff told me to hook you up.”

  “He’s not talking,” Amy said. “He’s caught the not-talking disease from this nasty little kid!” She gave the Silent Kid an unexpected tickle on his ribs. The boy jumped in the air and made a strange croaking sound, but didn’t laugh. “Aha, you almost talked!” Amy crowed. The Boston Terrier leaped up and down.

  Patrick cut in. “Seriously, Mike. Now or never. Grab something to eat while it’s hot and so forth. I’ll get you something. Are you allergic to wheat? Vegetarian? Anything like that?”

  Mike realized the man wasn’t kidding. He decided their attention must not be a trick. He said, “I’ll eat anything. That would be good. And maybe I could stretch my legs a couple minutes and take a whizz.”

  • • •

  Mike relieved himself at the edge of the darkness, facing outward into the night. There was a huge old man like a derelict yeti standing a few yards away. He had a fine hunting rifle in his hands. The Tribe called him “Wolfman.” Mike felt pretty conspicuous—he was not far from the shuttle bus and its sickly light fell on his back, and people were still giving him the evil eye at any opportunity, even while he had his penis out.

  He heard the Wolfman muttering to himself. He could also hear relaxed, everyday voices and the boom and crackle of campfires off in the distance. He smelled food cooking. Someone was playing a ukulele and singing. He heard the redheaded sheriff’s hoarse voice at the far end of the rest stop, barking out orders to somebody—apparently there was a line-of-sight gap among the perimeter sentries in the form of a drainage ditch, and she was hollering someone into position to keep an eye on it.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “I’m done.”

  The Wolfman escorted him back onto the shuttle, but omitted the handcuffs; a minute later Patrick returned with a tin pie plate loaded with food. It was canned beans, Spam, and fruit salad in a little school lunch portion, barely a year past its serve-by date. The fruit salad knocked unexpected tears out of Mike’s eyes. He’d put just such things in his son Kevin’s lunch. Whatever these people thought, Mike was still grieving. Despite his hunger, he put the food down and pinched his eyes with forefinger and thumb to stop the tears.

  “Are you okay?” Patrick asked. He was sitting up at the front of the bus. The Silent Kid was next to him, holding the little dog.

  “I lost my boy, Kevin. Brave little guy. He went to the safe place, I guess. I hope. But he was all I had in the world.”

  “I lost my boy, too,” Patrick said. “He was only forty-four.”

  Mike looked sharply at him, but Patrick’s broken face was bent with genuine sorrow. Must have been a lover or something, Mike figured. Still, he couldn’t eat. The hunger had been drowned by memories of his son. He rested his arms on the back of the seat and lowered his head between them.

  He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to explain. He wanted to die peacefully by willing his heart to stop.

  Patrick tried to open a conversation again, but there was nothing to rouse Mike from his thoughts, so he left the bus. The Wolfman stood sentry outside, scratching his ass. The Silent Kid and his dog remained there to observe Mike’s bent shoulders. Eventually, after the food was cold, Mike looked up at the Kid. His eyes were bloodshot and tears had made clean patches over his cheeks.

  “You can hear, even if you can’t talk,” Mike said. “My boy couldn’t hear so good. He was maybe a year smaller than you. Deaf in both ears.”

  He left it at that for a while, his chin quivering while he tried to keep the sorrow back. There wasn’t time for emotions now. He was still in danger, even if there were a few kind people among the Tribe. Then, when the Kid remained where he was, he and the squat-faced dog staring at Mike like he was the Mona Lisa, he decided to lay some home wisdom on the boy. Something he should have said to his own boy before it was too late.

  “Listen . . . if somebody grabs you, you do everything in your power to get away, you understand? And get back where you were when they did it. People will come back, looking. God knows I sure did. I know that one patch of ground where they grabbed my boy better than the house I grew up in. But my boy didn’t come back.”

  The Kid was silent. The dog broke wind
.

  “I don’t know this here Tribe very well. You neither. They got a wrong side and I’m on it. So I don’t think you should trust them too much. Mercy is something to look for in people. Hearts without mercy got a cruel streak instead.”

  Mike saw the sheriff amble up to the Wolfman outside the Courtesy Bus. They had a conversation in low voices, Danny pointing here and there, probably discussing vulnerabilities in their position. Mike’s time to tell the kid anything useful was probably running out—he didn’t want the child around, in case people got the wrong idea.

  “Listen, okay? I’m not some kind of child-stealer or anything. I’m a regular guy, too, swear to God. But there are a lot of real kidnappers around. Stick with the sheriff. I think she might be the only shit-together individual on the road.”

  A few seconds later, a posse of men with loud voices marched up to the sheriff and Wolfman outside the shuttle. They were talking about Mike and it didn’t sound like they wanted to invite him to a warm fireside chat. His heart accelerated: If they saw the kid in here they’d probably rush the bus and kill him on the spot.

  “Don’t let yourself get seen,” Mike said, and to his relief, the Kid seemed to get it. He ducked down between the seats, dropped the dog, and snaked his way forward. The dog followed. They slipped down the steps, and moments later Mike saw the kid evaporating down the outer side of the caravan a few vehicles away, the dog’s pale spots a semaphore in the shadows at his feet. The argument broke up outside after the sheriff raised her voice. Then she came aboard the Courtesy Bus and snapped the handcuffs around Mike’s wrist and the pole again.

  “It’s for your own safety,” she said, and threw him a blanket. Then she went back out into the night.

  • • •

  “The sheriff says there’s a big-ass scooter club behind us somewheres,” Ernie said. “But that ain’t my concern. My concern is we’re being shadowed.”

  The scouting teams were composed of outlaw bikers, and they mostly hung together in their off-hours; now they were sitting on the ground with their backs propped up on bedrolls, encircling a fire they’d built on top of a manhole cover so the asphalt wouldn’t heat up and stink. A dozen of them, looking not much different than they would have before the crisis, except all of them were lean. You couldn’t develop a beer belly in this world anymore. They wore scuffed leathers and old denim vests emblazoned with the names of their various clubs.

  The biker subculture had completely changed: There were some huge gangs that rode around pillaging human settlements; that was likely what Danny had spotted, and surely the Vandal Reapers fell into that category. But most bikers found themselves unaffiliated and came together in small bands, like the scouts of the Tribe. They had lost the rest of their local chapters, and with them, their allegiance to the bigger clubs, when the dead rose up. Women were treated as well as the men, too. That was another change in the zeitgeist. Like Charity, who had destroyed her resurrected husband with a broken kickstand. She bedded with Conn these days and would drop him, too, if he came back.

  “We’re being shadowed by what?” Topper grunted, and spat through the gap in his teeth into the fire.

  “A Chevelle. Fuckin’ early seventies SS unless I’m very much fuckin’ mistaken.”

  “I mean what’s driving it? Man or zero? A gorilla?”

  “If I known that,” Ernie replied with great dignity, “I woulda said ‘we’re being shadowed by a fuckin’ gorilla’ or whatnot, man. I don’t know what’s following us, except it’s driving a sweet-lookin’ Chevelle.”

  There were Vagos, Highwaymen, Hell’s Angels, and Mongols present in the scout’s circle, along with a number of previously unaffiliated riders. There remained only one old-school source of friction among the bikers: A couple of them rode Japanese machines. All but two of the scouts were men. The gender line didn’t much matter anymore among the Tribe, but women didn’t seem to take to the scouting lifestyle.

  Although she didn’t ride, they considered Sheriff Danny to be one of their own: a scout and the right kind of hard core.

  Conn spoke, a sound like a castle gate grinding shut. “I didn’t see nothing.”

  “You wasn’t fuckin’ looking is why you didn’t see nothin’,” Ernie said, his voice rising into a whine. “I seen it first time a couple days back. It was parked by the road. We scooted clean past it, and I noticed it ’cause my old man had the same model. If it’s what I think it is, it’s got the LS6 454 power plant. Highest factory horsage of any car as of that time. The Beast. Anyway it fuckin’ turned my head.”

  Ernie and Topper were buddies from the time before; Ernie looked like a hairy, bespectacled skeleton held together with veins and horsehide. Topper was more of the big ugly type, and the lead man in the scouting outfit. He wasn’t the meanest—that was Conn; Charity was probably second-meanest—but the smartest. Smart was back in style in those days, and in typically short supply.

  “So you saw it another time? And it was the same one?” Topper prompted, when Ernie seemed to have sunk into a nostalgic daydream.

  “Yeah. Yesterday we was going out on our scouting run and there was a road para-leel to ours and I saw it again, caught the color. Astro Blue. It was behind trees and bushes and shit. I only got a glimpse.”

  “Did you see it after that?” Conn said. He looked more irritated than usual, like a pissed-off sledgehammer, probably because Ernie’s story didn’t reflect well on his abilities as a scout.

  “No. I heard it. Remember when we was coming back tonight and we stopped for a fuckin’ piss? I heard it right as we shut down the scoots. Off in the distance real far. Then it stopped, too. But I know the sound ’cause I used to listen for it when my old man come home from the VFW. Had to be the same model. You-nique sound.”

  “We should tell the sheriff about that,” Topper said.

  “It don’t mean shit,” Conn rumbled.

  “That’s for her to decide, man,” Topper said. “Ernie, go tell the sheriff. We don’t need any more fuckin’ baby snatchers sneakin’ up on us.”

  “She’ll just bitch slap me for not checking it out at the time,” Ernie pleaded, his voice coming out of his red-tipped nose. “How come you kiss her ass so much, Topper?”

  “You gotta learn the difference between rimming and being polite,” Topper replied, and heaved himself to his feet. “I’ll tell her. You owe me a beer.”

  You owe me a beer was the expression people said to mean you can never repay me for this, because there was no beer left in the world, except the occasional tub of sour home brew.

  7

  Topper walked through the Tribe’s stronghold from campfire to campfire—they were kept going all night, in all weather—to the outer perimeter, nodded to the nearest sentry, and stepped off the pavement onto the dirt and into the darkness.

  Topper located the interceptor, parked at a distance from the rest of the convoy in the gravel area reserved for overflow parking, now knee-deep in weeds, not far from the low perimeter fence. They usually arranged the Tribe’s vehicles in a long crescent, so both ends of the line were visible from the center; certain vehicles were set a little apart, like the Courtesy Bus, fuel storage trucks, and the like. Danny always parked farthest from the rest, outside the range of firelight and voices. Most folks assumed it was because of the monster she rode with. Topper thought it was more likely she just didn’t want to be around people.

  The police Mustang squatted like a lion out at the edge of the property. He could see Danny doing something with the Leper—Kelley, he knew her name to be, but “Leper” was far more fitting. Sister or not. Ernie was half right about the ass-kissing: The sheriff could hold a grudge like nobody else. Better not to piss her off. She wasn’t a physical threat to Topper, but she could turn disapproval into a painful weapon.

  “Is there a problem?” Danny asked, when she saw who approached.

  “Ernie thinks we’re being paced by somebody in a Chevelle SS.”

  “And it didn’t occur to him t
o hunt them down?” she said.

  Now that Topper was close, he could see Danny was winding fresh bandages around the Leper’s head. He caught a glimpse of matted hair and nothing else; her face was lost in shadows. He almost wanted to see her clearly without the wrappings. See what a tame thinker looked like up close. Almost.

  “That’s what I told him,” Topper said. “You know how he is, he can’t improvise unless I tell him how to do it. But the thing I’m wondering is why some asshole would be following us in the first place. Anybody can tag along. That’s well known by anybody that’s heard of us.”

  “Ernie’s sure about this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could be linked to those motorcycles I heard. Got to investigate that shit.”

  Danny said something to Kelley that Topper couldn’t hear, and the gaunt undead girl walked away through a gap in the fence into the deep dark. She went straight out into the wild grass like there was nothing to fear. For her, of course, there wasn’t. Then Danny went around to the trunk of the interceptor and Topper heard the clink of bottles.

  “Drink?” Danny asked.

  “Why the fuck not?” Topper said, although he could think of a dozen good reasons why not. Like Danny’s temper got worse when she was drunk. But a couple of slugs wouldn’t hurt.

  She threw him a full bottle of Jim Beam and took one for herself, then went back around and sat on the hood of the car. “It’s cold out,” she said.