Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  “Just the shotgun,” the man said. “And a hammer. It’s also on the floor.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “I’m alone,” he said.

  “That’s so stupid I find it hard to believe. If you have a partner and your partner is right now planning anything, he or she should be aware that I will shoot you first and deal with them immediately afterward.” She spoke the last of this in a loud voice intended to carry—not just down the hallways, but up the stairwell to Vaxxine.

  “I’m police,” Danny continued, in her best checkpoint-in-a-war-zone voice: clipped, professional, and toneless. “I am Sheriff Danny Adelman. I won’t harm you, but we’re going to maintain this situation as-is until I decide you’re clear to move around. What’s your name?”

  “Joe Higashiyama.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m collecting medical supplies,” the man said. “This is a hospital.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I’m a doctor. I mean, I’m a medical student, but I’ve been a doctor pro tem since . . . things happened.”

  “A doctor for who? You’re taking a lot of materiel there.”

  “Have you heard of Happy Town?”

  “Happy Town? What the fuck kind of bullshit is that?” Danny dropped her MP voice. She was getting irritated. Not for any specific reason. Post-adrenaline crash. She sensed this guy was mostly harmless.

  “Happy Town. It’s the safe place. But we need medical supplies like anybody else, and they don’t deliver anymore. So I get sent out to do it.”

  Danny’s thoughts streaked off in a thousand directions at once. Happy Town. The safe place had a name. It was real, if this guy was telling the truth. Why would he lie? But if Happy Town had its shit together enough to be safe, why were they sending out doctors on foraging expeditions? Didn’t they have scouts or strike teams or anything? Were they understaffed? Besieged? Where was it, and who was in charge? She reeled her mind back in and sorted the questions into order.

  “Why would they send a doctor? Don’t you have people for this?” she asked.

  “I know what we need. When we send the teams out, they come back with all the wrong stuff.”

  “Where’s your backup?”

  “He got bit yesterday.”

  “And you didn’t return to base?”

  “We need this stuff. We need it bad.”

  Danny had a lot more questions, but those were the top tier. If Joe was lying, he was very good at it. Yet she believed him. He was in too vulnerable a position to lie for the good of the group. And now that she could see what he’d been shoving into the bags, it was clear he wasn’t just raiding the pill cabinet. He was stocking up on surgical supplies and sterile items, not tranquilizers.

  Time for the big question, Danny thought. “Where is this Happy Town?”

  “South Dakota badlands. Six hours northeast on a good day. Sometimes takes an overnight. Lot of people in Happy Town. We’ve picked over every medical facility closer than that. Can I put my hands down?”

  • • •

  Danny marched the young man back out of the basement to where Vaxxine waited. She couldn’t believe he was working alone, especially as a forager for some town full of people. There had to be someone else with him. But there was no trace of anyone; Vaxxine hadn’t heard or seen signs of an accomplice while she waited on the ground floor, and the young doctor didn’t engage in the telltale behavior to warn someone, like knocking things over to make a loud noise, raising his voice, or narrating what was happening. Danny had seen all that before: “So why are we walking up these stairs to the lobby?” and similar lame-ass attempts at warning. The reverse was true: Joe was quiet and careful.

  Vaxxine looked him over as if she was being introduced to a blind date. For Joe’s part, he looked at Vaxxine, saw the wheelchair, and immediately turned to Danny: “This is your idea of working in teams?”

  “She’d kick your ass one-handed,” Danny said.

  Vaxxine made a masturbating gesture. “Did you see any adult diapers or catheter bags down there? I’m running low.”

  “I wasn’t looking for those,” Joe replied. “Listen, I need to get in and out as fast as I can. Unless you’re planning to arrest me for trespassing, Sheriff, I’d like to keep doing what I need to do.”

  “I’ll help you carry things up if you’ll locate what she needs,” Danny said, after a few seconds of deliberation.

  “And what you need,” Vaxxine added, speaking to Danny. “I didn’t come here for me, I came here for you.” She turned her attention to Joe: “She’s getting these splitting headaches, like for-real migraines. She passes out. And I think it’s fairly serious. She’s had some blows to the head, combat trauma, things like that.”

  “We have an MRI back at Happy Town,” Joe said to Danny. “We could check you out there, if you’d like.”

  “Fuck you guys,” Danny said. She was getting increasingly embarrassed, which made her angry, because all of her emotions eventually drained to the sea through the swamp of hostility. They were discussing her like a pair of VA doctors shooting the breeze at her bedside, unaware she was conscious.

  • • •

  Based upon his willingness to answer questions, Danny and Vaxxine decided Joe was okay, and after that they worked fast. He had a big pickup truck with a cap on the bed; it was already half-filled with carefully organized boxes and bags of assorted materials related to medicine, pharmacy, and wellness. Everything from vitamins and cough syrup to cylinders of nitrous oxide and oxygen. Joe could start his own refugee camp, Danny thought. Although she kept her hands on the work and her eyes on the hiding places, her mind was on Happy Town. She asked a few questions about it while they carried stuff up out of the hospital; there was no doubt that it was the same safe place the Tribe had been hearing rumors about. Joe’s description of it sounded right.

  Danny was sure of it when Joe saw the Silent Kid and his dog peering at them from the cab of the big rig.

  “You’ve got a ticket to ride,” Joe said. “That boy there. He’ll get you in.”

  “In where?” Danny asked, although she knew.

  “Happy Town isn’t really there for adults. It’s for kids. We’re trying to get them out of harm’s way, and to do that we need to entice adults into bringing them. So we offer safety to the adults, too.”

  “That’s real generous of you,” Danny said, and shoved a case of rolled surgical tubing into the pickup.

  Joe didn’t seem to catch the sarcasm. “We’re losing so many kids out there to abandonment. People even use them for zero bait, did you know that? It’s like the most basic human instincts have been given up.”

  “Kids don’t mean shit in a crisis,” Danny said. “To the parents, maybe. But you want to see how fast people give up on the little ones, fire a gun over their heads. The adults will scatter like cockroaches and leave the kids behind. I know. I’ve done it.”

  “Left kids behind?”

  “Fired over their heads.”

  Joe clammed up for a while and worked in silence. If he hadn’t had a clear opinion of Danny before, it was obvious he did now. But after a couple more trips up and down the stairs, while they were looking for unexposed X-ray films in the depths of the hospital basement, he spoke his thoughts aloud.

  “We’re trying to change all that,” he said. “The cruelty to children. We decided to be the people who don’t scatter and leave the kids behind the way you said.”

  “You turned them into barter instead,” Danny replied. She’d been hoping he would reopen the topic. “You know people are kidnapping kids right and left to get in there, right? It’s a total fuckup. You’re making the situation ten times worse.” She expected Joe to deny it. This was the kind of utopian social engineering bullshit that infuriated her about liberals, back when that kind of distinction mattered.

  “That’s been a real problem for us,” Joe admitted, to her surprise. “People are bringing obviously stolen kids to us—
they don’t even know their names. We don’t want that and we’re trying to stop it. The Architect has a strict policy that you have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are the child’s parent or sole legal guardian. But the benefit outweighs the drawbacks. The kids get a real chance at safe lives. You know we don’t even keep them with the general population? They’re literally housed on a resort island for security purposes. We travel them by train, because it’s the most secure method. Trains, can you believe it? It’s almost like normal sometimes.”

  “Your trains caused me a shitload of problems,” Danny said. Joe shrugged. He wasn’t interested in her war stories. So she changed tack. “Here’s a question. What happens to the kids that you know were brought in by kidnappers?”

  “That’s the catch-22,” Joe admitted. “We take them anyway. If their real folks show up, we prosecute whoever brought them in. It doesn’t happen that often.”

  “That’s because the real folks are usually dead by then,” Danny said, and didn’t elaborate.

  • • •

  They kept working until around nine in the morning, when Vaxxine shouted down the stairwell that they had company.

  Danny and Joe clattered up the stairs. The sky had rapidly filled up with metallic clouds and there was a cold, wet wind coming in gusts. A couple of moaners were scuffing across the parking lot, both of them gray and sagging. They obviously hadn’t fed in a long time. Danny didn’t want to wake up the countryside with a gunshot, so she waited for them at the emergency room entrance, then took them out with Joe’s hammer, crushing their heads with flailing roundhouse swings.

  But across the parking lot, she could see another dozen of the things coming through the tall grass in the fields.

  “Incoming,” she said. For emphasis, she crushed the skull of the feeble zero lying by the doors.

  Joe threw a last load of gear into the back of his truck and banged the tailgate shut. Then he recited, in a bad Scots accent:

  “Comin thro the rye, poor body,

  Comin thro the rye,

  She draggled a’her petticoatie,

  Comin thro the rye!”

  “What?” Danny asked, not really wanting to know. She was hustling back toward the hospital, from which Vaxxine was just emerging.

  “It’s a poem by Robert Burns,” Joe said. He threw the shotgun and flashlight on the front seat of his truck. “Seemed appropriate, but never mind. I’m headed back to Happy Town. This was the last stop on my itinerary. You guys want to follow me there? You can’t both get in, but it would solve half your problems.”

  “Hell, yes,” Vaxxine said, as she rolled up fast with a couple of cardboard boxes balanced on her knees.

  “No,” Danny said.

  “But we—”

  Danny gave Vaxxine an unmistakable “shut up” look and interrupted: “We have some things to do, but if it’s open call we might come along later. Is that how it works?”

  “As long as it’s daylight hours,” Joe said, looking back and forth at the women, perplexed. “Take Route 334 north, exit on Jefferson Highway, get on the 15 east, and it’s maybe fifteen miles past Winnehackett where the train tracks are.”

  “Danny—” Vaxxine began to protest.

  “Then we’ll see you again sometime,” Danny said, again squashing Vaxxine’s protest.

  Joe shrugged, gave Danny a little salute off his eyebrow, and shut himself inside the truck. A few seconds later he was driving away, weaving between the undead.

  Danny and Vaxxine hurried back to the big rig, where Danny observed as Vaxxine reversed the process of getting out of the truck to haul herself back in. She had true gymnast’s arms: She lifted herself out of the chair and set herself on the running board, folded the chair and buckled it to the side of the truck, and then hauled her entire weight hand over hand up the handles on door and frame until she could swing her legs into the driver’s seat like a sack of Purina Dog Chow. The entire operation took less than a minute.

  “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.”

  4

  They 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.