Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

Kelley pressed her fists to her forehead like the heroine in a silent film.

  “I can’t face this hunger on my own. I’ll do terrible things. But it makes me want to stay alive. Not alive, whatever I am. I want to exist.”

  Kelley hesitated, then reached for the passenger door.

  “You can sit in back,” Danny said.

  “The hunger made me crazy. You have to understand.”

  “You can sit in back or you can walk. That’s how it is,” Danny repeated.

  Kelley climbed in behind the partition and curled up in a ball on the backseat floor.

  12

  The headlights were white spikes in the darkness, revealing only that there was more road to travel. They drove until dawn.

  Danny dwelled on the roots of the disaster they’d just endured. She’d drilled the Tribe so many times on what to do in an attack: pair up and fight back to back. Get up against something. Form larger groups. Predictably, tonight the chooks hadn’t done any of it, and they got their asses kicked. Nobody was blaming Danny, but she still felt it. The blame thing ate her up like acid.

  It was guilt, she knew. A long time ago, she had left them hanging so she could go off and look for her sister, and it had ended in disaster for everyone. Kelley died in her arms, and was resurrected as a zero. And that was the end of things. Danny ceased to have any other ties to the world than the Tribe. Since then, she’d focused entirely on its safety. The only reason she hadn’t been there when this night’s attack went down was that she was out doing the stuff most folks were terrified to do—on their behalf.

  Still, the guilt sizzled inside her. Maybe the way the hunger worked inside Kelley. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw only the hunch of Kelley’s back. She was still curled up, rocking a little like a junkie on bad dope.

  Danny turned her mind back to the Tribe. She decided they were going to have to get serious about combat training as soon as this current situation was handled. She needed these people to stop being chooks and become survival machines instead. If, as she believed, the thinkers were starting to make complex, coordinated attacks, the world had just gotten harder. They needed to get harder, too. She had the same thought several times before she realized she was only truly interested in Kelley. She raised her voice to be heard through the partition.

  “Are you still with me?”

  “I’m so hungry. Oh, God, it hurts.”

  “One more time, then I’m done asking. You weren’t involved in the attack, right?”

  “I told you. No. It was thinkers who set it up, but not me. It hurts.” Kelley was out of air. She sucked in another breath, and it sounded very like a sob to Danny.

  “Because nobody else could have gotten the hunters into that hole in the ground. And the dead ones were piled on top to hide the smell of them. Right?”

  “I knew I smelled something else. Just didn’t figure out what.”

  Danny looked at Kelley’s slack, bruised face. Peeling and discolored, like Halloween makeup that was starting to rub off. Danny wondered if jealousy was hiding in there. If the eternal hunger for flesh gave her sister some admiration for the thinkers that went to such lengths to feed.

  “What do we do about it? Maybe if we get you some rats or a cat or something?”

  “Pull over!”

  Danny stopped the interceptor on the shoulder and went around to the rear door, which had to be opened from the outside. She turned her hip so that Kelley wouldn’t see her holster flap was open. Kelley tumbled out onto the ground and squatted on hands and knees, retching. Thick bile dribbled from between her yellow teeth.

  “So hungry,” she gasped. “It burns.”

  Danny felt like she had to do something. If Kelley had been alive, if there were no zeroes, they’d be on the way to the emergency room.

  “What will help?”

  “Nothing. Oh, God.” More retching. Now thin black fluid spattered the pavement.

  “What if I bled into a paper cup or something? I could give you something to live on for a while. Or maybe find an animal.”

  “Shut up,” Kelley wheezed. After a while she got back on her feet, leaning on the interceptor. Danny closed the rear door, signaling that Kelley could get in front. She looked too weak to do anything much.

  They drove on. Kelley cradled her belly. She drank some water without being coached. Then she spoke.

  “I’ve never felt anything like . . . I don’t know if that’s true. Since I died, I haven’t dealt with this. I kind of remember feeling alive. It’s different now. I’m still alive, but my body isn’t. Or it wasn’t. But now it is.”

  She breathed, then: “I remember how I used to talk, and stand, and what I did. I know I used to love bacon and tomatoes. My favorite TV show was The Prisoner, which is like really old. I liked showers but not baths. I liked reading. I can’t read now. That part of my brain doesn’t work. I can see the letters but they don’t join together.”

  “I hardly ever read.” Danny didn’t know what else to say, and didn’t care. Kelley never talked like this. Not in life or afterward. She wanted it to keep coming.

  “I thought I didn’t care about eating anymore. I used to love hot dogs with brown mustard. Now I don’t. Until the blood got in my mouth, I didn’t care about anything. I was just sore all the time.

  “But now I’m hungry. I’m hungry like I climbed a mountain with no breakfast, and at the top there wasn’t any lunch, so I climbed back down and it was too late for supper—forever. And no matter what I do, there’s no food. Forever.

  “My stomach is so empty it feels like a black hole or something. Like it could swallow light. My fingers hurt. I feel like I’m eating my own bones. Like every nerve inside my rotten body has come alive. Like if I just eat human meat I can be alive again and maybe then I’ll remember what hot dogs taste like and I’ll care about anything except spurting hot blood and wet chunks of fucking flesh in my mouth, killing the hunger. Oh, fuck, to make it stop. Anything to make it stop.”

  Kelley had taken several breaths. The last words came out in a squeak, her lungs drained. She didn’t breathe again for a while. Danny kept on driving, waiting. She saw there was gray, thick saliva bubbling through the bandages. A thought was fluttering around inside her head like a bat. She didn’t want to acknowledge it. But part of her was thinking of the mercy shot.

  Kelley spoke again, urgently.

  “I don’t think I can handle this much longer. I’m going to tell you what I know about my kind, okay? Because you need to know this shit. Thinkers, okay? I wasn’t like the others and I didn’t get it. Now I do. Remember early on in the disaster, the thinkers attacked everybody like maniacs? They were smart, but they did stupid stuff, just running at people and trying to kill them. I understand why, now. They were hungry like this. They were so fucking hungry.

  “But the ones that got meat in their bellies, they started to think. They calmed down. They started making plans. Nothing’s any good after tasting human blood, okay? Nothing even comes close. So only feeding mattered. Only feeding matters now. Nothing else will ever matter.

  “Thinkers are teaming up. They’re setting traps and making plans that would scare the fuck out of you. Taking over. That’s what they want. The ones I’ve talked to? They all have a scheme. And now I get why.”

  • • •

  The renewed hunger had brought some clarity to Kelley’s mind. The other thinkers were insane from hunger when they turned, focused only on gaining flesh to eat. They couldn’t think strategically. But once they had fed, they could think of the future. She had experienced this herself, although never the perfect release that came from devouring human meat. Any warm blood would do, but man-flesh was the finest thing, the reason to endure.

  There were things she hadn’t experienced. She was isolated from her own kind, her new species. She hadn’t killed. So she hadn’t passed through the postfeasting stage during which, with newfound clarity of mind, the thinkers developed rudimentary relationships with one another,
and devised strategies and plans. These creatures, it seemed to her, never forged the strong pack behaviors of the hunters; rather, they were utterly selfish, only working together to achieve their individual ends, which happened to be always identical—they wanted to feed.

  Kelley knew from the time before she changed that they had learned to capture people alive rather than butcher them outright where they fell. They had learned to hide the traces of their attacks, and how to conceal themselves before the living were lured in. She understood how it worked, now. Everything they had experienced in life was still there, memories as clear as day. But it was all jumbled. It had to be sorted through. She was doing the same thing right now. But she wasn’t only obsessing about the kill back there (although now it dominated her thoughts). Now the things she’d been dwelling upon didn’t seem to matter anymore. Who was she? What had she become? It didn’t matter. Only the hunger mattered.

  Kelley’s thoughts turned into a long break in the conversation. Danny intruded, following the train of her own thoughts.

  “Was it the one I saw you talking to?” she asked. “Was it him that did this to the Tribe?” She wasn’t sure she wanted an answer. It would mean Kelley was complicit, if only through her silence.

  “No. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t talk to the one who did it.”

  “I want you to stop contacting your kind, Kelley. Don’t talk to them.”

  Kelley didn’t respond. Which was an answer, after a fashion.

  • • •

  Morning found them on a long, empty highway. The farm road behind the ranch was on the map. It went nowhere for a while and then turned back to the highway several miles ahead. After that, the Chevelle could have gone in any number of directions, but Danny didn’t think the kidnappers intended to stray far from the big road, which was clearly their hunting ground—and the fastest route of escape. In that case, they were somewhere ahead. And if Topper was right, they had a truck with them. It wouldn’t be as fast as the Chevelle. With a little luck, she and the bikers could overtake them before midday.

  “I can smell infection on you,” Kelley said.

  “Well yeah, I got bit,” Danny replied, rotating her arm to show the rip in her jacket. She didn’t want to talk.

  “You will become like me someday. Then you’ll understand how hungry I am.”

  “No, I won’t, Kelley. It doesn’t work that way. You know it.” This was a subject Danny hated to discuss. Her sister had been bitten, and the infection killed her. She had died and come back. Danny, however, had been bitten badly enough to draw blood at least six times since the outbreak began, and she’d never gotten anything worse than a nasty bacterial infection.

  “You say you’re immune, but nobody just dies,” Kelley said. She was watching Danny from behind her inky sunglasses, the bandages around her face fluttering in the breeze from the cracked windows.

  Somewhere deep inside there was a tickle of fear that Danny wouldn’t acknowledge. She was afraid of her kid sister. The way she’d gone wild during the attack. Maybe because the thing seated next to her wasn’t truly her sister anymore. She couldn’t tell.

  “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.”

  13

  As 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.