Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  Wulf insisted they rinse their mouths out. They swished and spat water at the ground far below, in long glittering streams; Danny vomited and had to wash her mouth out again. The fanfare Wulf lavished on this bottle made her feel like she was on a first date. He examined the label gravely, speaking with reverence, like a lover, like a priest. He had to enunciate very slowly in order to be understood; his tongue was thick with the whiskey.

  “This here bottle used to retail for about fifteen hundred bucks. You can pay more for wine, but it ain’t easy to get more out of a bottle. It’s about 90 percent cab-sauv with a little merlot, if I recall arightly. Them’s the grape varietals. It don’t fuckin’ matter. Hell. You got a corkscrew?”

  Danny did, as a matter of fact, have a corkscrew, on her utility belt. The cork was dry as leather at the top and crumbled like red velvet cake at the bottom, but Wulf took a whiff and declared the wine had survived the decades in perfect condition. He handed the bottle to her.

  “First pull is yours, Sheriff.”

  Danny took the bottle, smelled the liquid inside. It had an intense aroma like evergreens, flowers, and fruit. There was something almost like a cigar to it. She regretted they hadn’t started with this stuff, but what the hell. The old man probably hadn’t intended to share it at all.

  “Wolfman, how come you know about wine?”

  “Used to have a life.”

  “I didn’t even know you could drive.”

  “There’s all kinds of shit you don’t know about me, Sheriff. And I guess there’s all kinds of shit I don’t know about you. I know one thing, though. You finally lost that sister of yours for good.”

  Danny’s fingers tightened around the neck of the bottle. This was the subject she was hoping to avoid.

  “What do you think about that?” she said, after the silence had gotten too long.

  “I think you lost her the one time and you kind of half got her back, and you tried to make that work on account of you were a shitty sister and a half-assed guardian when she was alive and you wasn’t there when she needed you. That’s why she run off. And now she’s gone for good and you must have a hole in your heart about the size of a fuckin’ elephant. Take a swig.”

  The wine tasted to Danny like sour milk and raisins, but she liked the velvety feeling of it on her tongue. They drank the entire bottle in short order, and spoke little.

  After that, they drank whatever came to hand—vodka, tequila, rum. Danny lost touch with the world; the sun was starting to go down when consciousness fell away and she entered the universe of the profoundly drunk. She walked carefully around the perimeter of the water tower on legs made out of marshmallow, clinging to the railing as if there was a storm at sea and her on a small ship on the bosom of the water. She vomited again, more than once, spilling alcoholic bile over the side. Wulf was singing songs from his youth, the kind of stuff Danny considered oldies. His voice sounded like a hacksaw cutting through an anchor rope.

  She remembered how she used to drink when she was in the service, hard like this, on leave with her buddies Harlan and the others in San Diego, drinking for nights on end, cheap tequila and beer, drinking dirty-sweet tamarindo when it wasn’t time for beer, say, before 9:00 a.m. . . . she and the crew were so drunk for so long that at least twice on leave she never made it up to Forest Peak to see Kelley, who was living with people who were relative strangers to Danny. But now with the water tower at her back and the ruined world far below, she was so drunk that instead of feeling the sorrow of the memory, she saluted it on the way by, acknowledging the pain like a veteran at a parade, no longer a part of the machine, no longer invested, but intimate with it from indelible experience.

  She and Wulf entered the holy state of drunkenness in which wisdom and nonsense become one, up and down ran forever sideways, and the motion of the planets and sun and universe could be detected merely by standing still. There was a roaring in Danny’s ears like the ocean or a thousand-tongued laughing god, or the wind of cosmic wings; she felt no pain, no grief, nothing but drunk. The tortured self, whoever that was, she could see from above and below and knew it for what it was, a selfish illusion, the purpose of which was to keep her from savoring life. Life, which tasted like scotch and beer and wine, all the wet fire and dim light of it, burning, the fire that splashed and leaped, the liquid flame.

  Danny slipped and fell but didn’t drop off the tower; she lay where she landed on the catwalk, with one leg hanging in space, her body bound in the boneless mother of the sleeping bag. She watched the stars come out in a sky that rotated above her like a pierced tin lantern caught in the wind. The cold and the sorrow danced in the distance and she felt neither of them, but watched and felt nothing.

  21

  Danny awoke to a bitterly cold morning with the sun broken like an egg yolk on the horizon. Her head pounded intolerably. She couldn’t tell if it was one of her increasingly mean headaches or just a savage hangover, and didn’t know if it mattered. She had opened her gummy eyes to find herself in the fetal position, limbs pulled up under the sleeping bag in a stingy pocket of warm air. She struggled to the sitting position and her skull cried out as if it had been split in two.

  Her first thought, which took a minute to generate, was to see how Wulf was doing. So Danny got to her knees and began to crawl along the walkway that surrounded the water tower. She was still quite drunk, she realized. The world was swaying and the height of the tower made her feel sick. She felt that falling sensation that came to her most often when disaster struck, but this disaster was internal: a hangover of the gods.

  After what felt like three circuits around the entire tower, Danny found Wulf on the far side, snoring in a complex, syncopated pattern in the seated position with his head sunk between his knees and his sleeping bag pulled over his head like a monk’s cowl. Danny suddenly understood why so many long-term homeless people wore heavy jackets all year: better to be too hot than too cold. And if you didn’t have an indoors to retreat to, you didn’t get to choose the middle. He looked relatively warm in his blackened layers, probably wearing six pairs of pants. Danny was shivering.

  She needed to get down off the tower somehow and warm up. And if the sick feeling in her guts turned into the shits, she didn’t want to be seventy feet in the air. There were no zeroes around that she could see. Down below her, she could see the police car, parked inside the perimeter fence around the base of the tower. It looked like a toy with its shot-up surfboard-shaped light bar and a big 213 painted on the roof. The view reminded her of the grain silo she’d climbed to view the Radiation Express. It made her think of Kelley, and a flood of guilt and sorrow rushed through her mind. She drowned in it for a minute. The headache was getting worse. If she was going to climb down off the tower, she’d better do it now. She might be incapacitated before long. The ladder up the silo had been caged in. This one was wide open to the world. Danny began the slow climb down, hooking the rungs in her elbows because her good hand didn’t work much better than her bad one.

  • • •

  And so it went. Wulf and Danny drank steadily for days.

  When a thin, icy wind began to slash down from the north, smelling of snow, they moved the operation down off the tower; there was a pump house at the foot of the structure that made a reasonable shelter for Danny, and Wulf preferred to sleep outdoors, so the subsequent couple of nights were passed without too much discomfort, except for the endless, increasingly drunken condition they were achieving and the bilious guts that came with it.

  Night and day blended together. The cold snap seemed to be permanent. It was winter, after all. There was frost on the grass and the metal of the tower was so icy it burned. But the drinking companions warmed themselves with alcohol. They ate little and drank much. Sometimes Wulf wept; Danny didn’t know what specific memory brought it on. For her part, she tried to shove the sadness down, building woozy compartments for all her woes and then drowning them one at a time.

  Most of all, she avoided thoug
hts of the Tribe.

  “I was the worst sister,” Danny said, in a moment of drunken clarity. Wulf, who had been singing all the songs he could remember from the sound track to Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come, stopped and squinted at her.

  “I never gave Kelley the time of day,” she went on. “I blamed her for making me responsible for somebody.” She had a tough time getting the word “responsible” to sound right, but Wulf understood.

  “I handed her the anger I couldn’t hand my goddamn parents for dying so young. I sucked, man. I was never there for her.”

  “You handed yourself the anger, Sheriff,” Wulf said, pointing at the sky like an Old Testament prophet.

  “This one time,” Danny said, “Kelley had this good bra. I mean one of those ones cost real money with lace around the edges and foam padding and straps that don’t twist up. It was like bucket seats for your tits. And I couldn’t figure out how she got the money. I thought she must have stolen it.” Here she paused to remember why she brought the subject up. “Anyways, she wears it like a week and finally I’m like ‘you got to wash that thing’ and so she does, and she puts it in the dryer. Well that fancy bra come out of the dryer looking like a rubber chicken with its neck broke. It was destroyed.”

  “What’s your point, Sheriff?”

  “I don’t know, but it seems like a sad story to me now. I was just pissed off at the time.”

  • • •

  Danny lost track of the days. They drank and passed out and woke up and drank again. At some point, there must have been a supply run; she couldn’t remember where it had come from, but they’d ended up with six cases of Coca-Cola and thirty cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, and there was a massive new dent in the passenger side door of the interceptor. According to the shipping label on the cola, they had gotten it from Fossil Deep, Nebraska, so they might still be in Nebraska.

  They shot up the water tower with Danny’s sabot rounds and used the resulting waterfall to wash the zombie guts off the vehicle. It didn’t make it much cleaner, but the stink was noteworthy.

  This was no ordinary bender Danny had embarked upon.

  There was a greater purpose down there, under it all. She wanted to die drinking, go out like a lord. She assumed Wulf was operating along the same lines. The Tribe must have moved on by now. It had probably gotten around the swarm and found the safe place, followed the train tracks to somewhere. Maybe chased down those damn kidnappers. Those kids. Guilt attacked her whenever she let herself get below a certain threshold of inebriation, so Danny wasn’t sober for a single minute.

  Something Kelley had said wandered around in her mind, repeating itself now and then, still meaning nothing at all.

  One for you, twenty for me.

  • • •

  Another cold morning showed up despite their best efforts, and with it a light snow. They had stored their liquor supply inside the shed; Danny slept in the fetal position next to the pump housing alongside the bottles, jamming herself deep down in the sleeping bag. She awoke to discover they were almost out of drinkable liquor, her boots jingling among the empties. Even an alcoholic has standards; Danny did not intend to kill herself with Jägermeister or peppermint schnapps.

  She’d been suffering from diarrhea and flaring headaches since the first morning, and she had vomited more than usual during the bender. Exhaustion had overtaken ambition: She simply couldn’t keep on drinking anymore. Her attempt to drift painlessly away on a river of alcohol had not succeeded. Her biology was either too tough or too practiced. It was time to make a plan, if her head didn’t explode. Her tongue felt and tasted like a roasted tarantula.

  Danny crawled out of the shed. She was still plenty drunk from the previous night’s festivities, but this was the trying-to-get-home part of the intoxication, when the fun has gone out of it and everything was a challenge. She looked out and saw clean white snow like a coat of paint on the world. Still not a single zero anywhere around. The local undead population might by now have gone into hibernation in one of their nests, buried in leaves in a cellar hole or burrowed into the refuse at the nearest dump. Not all that different from herself. Or it might be this was a place with so few people in it that the undead didn’t even have a foothold.

  She and Wulf had been trying to talk last night, and Danny remembered part of the conversation. It had seemed important. It probably was. Wulf had said something about how people didn’t really forgive, but they did forget. Danny had pointed out, with the insight of the extremely drunk, that nobody ever asked for forgiveness anyway, so how would he know?

  “You gotta forgive yourself first,” Wulf had replied. “Afore anybody else can do it.”

  That seemed important in some way. Danny sought him out now in the sharp cold morning. Wulf was sleeping upright, as he often did, head between his knees, with his back against the interceptor. Danny could smell alcohol and concentrated urine from ten feet away. The old man was dusted with snow.

  “Morning,” she said.

  Wulf didn’t respond. She was about to try again when she realized something was different. He wasn’t snoring.

  She crouched in front of him, but her balance wasn’t too good and she fell over backward. A lance of pain went through her head. She got to her knees and looked closely at her stinking friend. She shook him; he didn’t stir. His eyes were open, but staring down at the snowy ground. His hair was frozen, his beard sparkling with ice.

  No, Danny thought. She couldn’t bear to lose another one so soon. And yet she found her sidearm was in her hand, unbidden, and the safety was down. Because the world said yes. She waited, wondering if he would reanimate. In the beginning, the contagion was airborne and spread like smoke across the world. More than half of all dead people rose again. Then the rules changed. Lately it took a wound to get infected, direct transmission. Not airborne any longer. Whatever the infection was, it changed all the time. Danny had herself seen those deformed and diseased zeroes recently, riddled with some mutation. She waited, wondering if the early form of the disease still lived in Wulf.

  He never came back.

  She waited an hour beside him, and he remained as he was, a frozen corpse, eyes downcast and his rumpled nose drooping. Somebody she once knew.

  Danny remembered the last coherent words she had heard him speak the previous night: “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” Maybe he had known he was dying.

  Danny slipped her weapon back into its holster.

  • • •

  She drove the interceptor back the way they’d come, through all that blank, meaningless landscape of frozen grass and failed crops, prairie and cracked roads. The only break in the horizon was the distant smoke from Wulf’s funeral pyre. She had a simple plan. It was like a gift that he had given her before he died in his sleep. She was going to go back to the Tribe, find them somehow, and forgive the fuckers if they would forgive her. Then maybe she could forgive herself. It was her only option left in this forsaken world.

  22

  During a map check to figure out where she was, Danny discovered a route that could take her around the swarm and the radioactive zone, south, east, then north. But she wanted to find out what the train depot was about, and see how the Tribe had disposed of things. They might still be sitting in the same place, or they might have caught a train, or could have scattered to the wind. So she took a more direct path, due north. It would run almost straight up the border of South Dakota and Wyoming.

  Now that she’d stopped drinking, Danny was feeling the guilt she’d been avoiding. That wasn’t all she felt: The headache seemed to be with her all the time, more than a hangover, like a wound. As if there were pins holding her brain in place inside her skull. And she thought she had a yeast infection coming on. It hurt to pee. She needed water. She cursed herself for shooting up the water tower, and they’d consumed all the water they’d brought. Kelley had scolded her years ago that drinking sugary stuff made hangovers worse, so Danny didn’t touch the colas rolling around on
the passenger side floor, bumping into the weapons backpack there.

  The day warmed up, became mild enough so the snow melted away, except in the shadows. Eventually she found a cattle ranch, the feed lots studded with the shriveled carcasses of the herd that had been left behind the fences when the people went away. It reminded her of the place back where they’d found the half-eaten victims of the Chevelle driver. So much unfinished business.

  The remorse beat at her; she’d left the idiots under her command to whatever fate the world decided to hand out. Her old friends, the Silent Kid, those still-missing kids. She’d abandoned her post. Nobody should be in a position of such responsibility they could fuck up so many lives just by falling prey to a little sentimentality for their own damn sister. It had happened before, when she thought her group was safe and she’d gone off on her own to seek out Kelley. Now she’d left them again, and again for Kelley. The results would probably be equally disastrous.

  Danny siphoned gas out of a farm truck into the interceptor, ignoring the raging thirst that was turning her mouth into cigarette ash. Then she went in search of water.

  There was a pump in the yard of the ranch house, an old-fashioned model with a long cast-iron handle. Danny considered seeing if the taps in the house worked, but she kept having visions of another charnel pit of blood and flies. She decided to see if the hand pump would work. She pushed and pulled at the resistant handle until there was stinking sweat pouring out of her, and at long last it barked, croaked, belched up rusty sludge, then jets of reddish water, and then the water ran clean and cold. Danny hadn’t cleared the ranch house or barns for zeroes, but she didn’t care right now. She’d see them coming across the yard. She sluiced the icy water over her skin, raising goose bumps. Gasped and blew and stuck her head under the stream. Then she pumped a couple of gallon jugs full, drank nearly half of one of them, refilled it, and turned to go back to the interceptor.