Rise Again Below Zero

by Ben Tripp

  “How did you get out of that hotel?” Danny asked, after they had sat without speaking for a quarter of an hour.

  “My God, you were listening to all that talk?”

  “It’s interesting. Most people didn’t escape the cities if they didn’t bug out in the first few minutes. And no offense, but you’re not exactly set up for escapes.”

  “You underestimate the power of wheels, Baby Love. Ten days I was in that bloody closet. It had been dead quiet for three of those, but I was too scared to come out. But I felt like my kidneys were going to fail and the stink was something awful, so eventually I opened the door and peeked out. Oh, the stink was even worse out there! Corpses all around the place, some of them all blood with big pieces missing and some had black on them like ink, which I later sorted out was the difference between someone who died alive and someone who died after death, zombielike.

  “It was no easy thing to get out of there with all the limbs and bodies on the floor, but I made my way, using a mop handle to push me a path. Then one of the things I thought was dead, it kind of twitched upright and looked right at me with those eyes like pieces of sushi meat. Zeroed in like a hawk. It was getting up and I just wheeled out the doors as fast as I could, and that’s when I saw they were all about the place, the ones that weren’t dead, or undead, or what you will, but had only been like resting while they waited for something to eat.

  “I got out onto the street and pointed myself down the hill toward the Miracle Mile—you know how steep it is there, practically straight down—and rolled as fast as I could. Blistered my hands trying to brake so I wouldn’t kill myself. I must have hit thirty miles an hour, and I was zigzagging all over trying to keep away from the monsters and not to hit any of the cars and the wreckage, it was everywhere you know. And right then when I thought for sure I was going to wipe out and die, be torn apart, this beautiful feeling came over me. Because it was the same as the last time I went down the mountain on my skis, this feeling like the wind was going straight through my body and I didn’t weigh anything, I was flying, you know?

  “I was so frightened, and at the same time I felt like God Himself was pushing me along, his hands on me. I don’t remember if I was screaming or laughing, but for one minute I felt like I felt before, and this time I didn’t break my back. I came to a stop down on Santa Monica Boulevard, I think it was, and I couldn’t get the chair to slow down properly because my hands were so bloody they wouldn’t grip. Now, this chair has a little motor, mostly to go up and down, but it will drive along real slow, so I motored until the battery died and there weren’t so many zeroes there. But they surrounded me eventually. Came out of the shadows and oozing up out of cars and from piles of corpses. And I wanted to die somehow, but there wasn’t any way I could think of before they got me.

  “But that’s when somebody came up in a van. I survived because somebody saved me. We made it out of the city, five of us, but then they right away left me because I’d just be a burden. They left me at an old folks’ home in the desert, where I found this leg-free driving rig on a car, and a lot of my supplies came from there, too. But you know what? I wasn’t hurt by their going and leaving me like that. You know what hurt?”

  “Your hands?”

  “What hurt was that somebody saved me. I wanted to survive all by myself, and now I do. But I’m tired. I’m alone and tired. Whatever I had to prove, there’s no point proving it just to myself.”

  Danny thought about that. It reminded her of her own determination to go back to the Tribe. “I wouldn’t give up what you got here,” she said. “You might want a partner, but you don’t need to get involved with a big group. I been doing that since the beginning and it was always a pain in my ass. This is better. Less is more.”

  “Are you volunteering?”

  Danny shrugged. “No. Nothing personal. I gotta figure out what to do with this kid, and there’s some unfinished business out there. But you’re independent as fuck like you are now. Join up with some happy assholes in a big group, and you’ll turn back into the handicapped gimp they don’t want to deal with. You’re kicking ass with both hands. Don’t give that up.”

  Danny felt irritation bubbling up like hot tar inside her head. She wasn’t accustomed to making long speeches and she didn’t like to talk about abstractions like personal freedom. She dealt with concrete things, action. This conversation smelled like philosophy. And she didn’t like how disappointed Vaxxine had looked when she said “no” to the idea of teaming up. But why the hell would anybody want to team up with Danny?

  Of course, Vaxxine hadn’t heard the story about Kelley, and Danny resolved never to mention it.

  Vaxxine was about to respond, both of them now staring out their side windows in opposite directions, when the rain abruptly stopped. Now they made eye contact. It was weird: The sky turned the color of spoiled meat, an iridescent green, and the rain fell away as if a faucet had been turned off. They could feel the barometric pressure change inside their ears, as if aboard an aircraft descending rapidly. The Silent Kid woke up and looked around, blinking, and his pup stopped snoring, yawned, and pressed his stub of nose to the glass, staring out at the dripping gray world.

  The clouds overhead looked strange, drooping in heavy globs like milk poured into a tank of water, knuckled and eerie. The air was absolutely still. Danny lowered her window and checked the flanks of the truck for any zeroes that might have crept up on them while they waited out the storm.

  “Mind if I get out on the hood?” she asked.

  “Don’t scratch the paint,” Vaxxine said, unconsciously placing a hand on the Silent Kid’s head. There was a dense, airless feeling of foreboding that came not from inside them, but from the sky. Danny climbed out the window and onto the hood of the engine. The roof was too steep to stand on; she’d have preferred the extra few feet. But the nose of the truck was plenty high. She didn’t have any of her best gear: no binoculars, only her sidearm and what had been in her belt and in her munitions backpack. But the air had become warm, oppressive, yet uncannily clear. She could see for miles. The rainstorm was like a seething curtain blowing rapidly away across the city, then trailing its tattered shrouds out across the distant plains; it moved faster than any front Danny had ever seen.

  The strange clouds hung so low she felt she could rip them open with a stick held over her head.

  Then there was a sound—it could have been whale song or the mourning of giants. Deep, bone-stirring sound. And several of the roots of the clouds began to descend. A million snakes were hissing in the air—nasty secrets being told by a multitude of voices all at once. Then a gust whipped past and nearly tossed Danny to the ground. She looked down below their elevated roadway and saw the grid below them was now crawling with zeroes, driven from hibernation by the storm. They squirmed like maggots.

  “I think we got a twister,” Danny said, slinging herself back inside the cab.

  “Those come in the spring, don’t they? The other half of the year.”

  “The fuck do you do in a tornado situation?” Danny couldn’t remember. It was about the only natural disaster her high mountain hometown wasn’t heir to. That and tsunamis.

  “It can’t be,” Vaxxine said. And then: “I don’t know. Shit. Get under something. Find an underpass.”

  “Not down there. We have a lot of company. Let’s see what happens, and if it’s coming this way we’ll drive like a bat out of hell.”

  “Oh, my God,” Vaxxine said.

  Like a conjurer’s trick, a genie, what had been a twist in the clouds descended until a corresponding vortex rose up to meet it. A pillar of smoky debris had joined cloud and land. They could see objects in it, whirling as if in slow motion—but that was an illusion created by distance. The thing leaned and warped but never broke, gaining girth and density as it approached the city, a titanic funnel sucking everything up and vomiting it out as wreckage.

  There were several more of these, slithering along the landscape in the distance
, all of them marching to war in the same direction. The nearest of them, the one approaching the urban area, was the largest, and its path was going to take it close to their position.

  “It’s heading up the goddamn road,” Danny said. “We can’t go that way. I think we’d better move, after all.”

  Vaxxine started the truck. The cyclone was behind them. Danny couldn’t take her eyes off it. It struck the buildings at the fringe of the city and they exploded, roofs flying off, shingles lifting like bats off the plywood substrate and then the entire structures flailing into the air, skeletons of wood and steel contorting and breaking apart. The trailers of big rigs just like theirs were leaping into the sky, flying, coming down among apartment buildings and parking lots. Something detonated and the dirty red fire was wrung out by the blast of the wind. It was growing darker and darker, as if the storm was caused by the extinction of the sun.

  Vaxxine sank the hand control for the gas as far as it would go and the truck’s tires protested on the wet pavement, found purchase, and suddenly they were moving fast. Something rained down on them from above, chattering off the sheet metal; it was eyeball-sized hailstones. Vaxxine shunted the rig side-to-side, the light back end skittering on the road, bumping and crunching into abandoned cars. Up ahead, the roadway descended to grade. The local swarm had not been idle while they waited up above: A mass of zeroes was coming up the road. They were pale, rain-bloated things, so densely packed their reaching arms looked like the legs of some hideous millipede turned over on its back.

  “You’re going to have to ram them,” Danny said.

  “This thing will spin out,” Vaxxine said. “We’ll be overrun. Mother of Jesus.”

  “Then back up.”

  They both checked the mirrors, and then Danny stuck her head out to check whether she was reading the view wrong. Because all they could see was a wall of whirling debris. The entire world was being destroyed by a millstone.

  “Get out and run for it,” Vaxxine said. “Take the Kid and the dog. We have a couple minutes. Go over the side and you can get down into a storm drain or something.”

  “And leave you here?”

  “I guess so. I’m not running anywhere.”

  “Fuck it,” Danny said, and took the Silent Kid in her arms. He was crying, but soundlessly. He grabbed the whining little dog and wedged him between himself and Danny. She could feel the bony little creature shivering. Vaxxine’s face was wet with tears, too. She slung one of her strong arms around Danny’s neck and placed her closely-shaven head against Danny’s and they sat like that, feeling the wind plucking at the truck, testing its weight.

  They could not have been in a more exposed position, nor more helpless. Even with the windows up the roar of the tornado was deafening, all the devils in the universe screaming at once.

  Something banged off the hood of the truck, and there was particulate matter chittering over the window glass like they were inside a sandblasting machine. The truck began to lean, rocking on its shocks, and then the back end became distinctly lighter and it began to turn. They would be airborne at any moment. Danny alone kept her eyes open, so she saw something vast and solid sail overhead, coming down a few hundred yards away, bursting apart on impact with a parking structure; it had been a suburban house. She saw an armchair fly out of a window frame. She discreetly pulled her precious backpack to her side and cradled it beneath her one free arm.

  The zeroes were still coming on, their rudimentary minds unsuited to existential threats like this: They sensed prey and cared for nothing else.

  “I wish you’d say something,” Danny remarked to the Silent Kid.

  Then the tornado was on top of them. The world went completely dark.

  The noise was unbearable; they could have been rats trapped inside a pipe organ. The truck shuddered and bounced and there was a rapid, irregular tattoo of debris crashing all around them, metal bending and tearing, stone shattering, glass exploding. Danny raised her head because she had never failed to face an enemy down before and this was her last confrontation. So it was she who saw the churning skin of the tornado, a wild mass of darkness and destruction, an ancient god awakened to avenge itself on the sinful species that Armageddon had failed to extinguish.

  And then it had passed, and they were still alive.

  Three minutes after the traverse of the tornado, they dared to look around. Nothing big had fallen from the sky for sixty or seventy seconds. Light was returning to the world. In the distance, the tornadoes continued their march unopposed, destroying the abandoned city, hammering it to pieces on their way northwest. Where the funnels had dragged the earth, long, blackened paths had been scoured down to the soil, obliterating everything before them. To either side, debris was piled high, and nothing was entirely untouched—although strange acts of mercy were everywhere. A bathtub was perched in a tree. A church steeple stood firm and unruffled, except for an old-model Volkswagen that had been inserted through the belfry. On the hood of the rig in front of them there sat a frying pan filled with dirt.

  The roadway ahead was completely clear, free of cars, zeroes, and wreckage. It had never been so clean.

  Danny climbed down and cut away a long strap of barbed wire that had wrapped itself around the front of the vehicle; beneath the axle she found a severed arm, withered and rotten. She looked more closely at the ground and realized there were fragments of human remains everywhere—teeth, flesh, bones. The zeroes had been pulverized.

  • • •

  They drove on, and by late afternoon they were within ten kilometers of where Joe had said they would find Happy Town. Of the tornado, they spoke very little.

  “Was that a miracle?” Vaxxine remarked, some twenty minutes after they’d left the city behind.

  “If that was a miracle,” Danny said, after some reflection, “it was a piss-poor example.”

  They didn’t speak of it again, least of all the Silent Kid.

  5

  They found what looked like a relatively secure place to stop: an auto repair shop with a tall razor-wire fence around it and drainage canals along two sides. The shop was a low concrete block and there was a clapboard house on a rise behind it with a couple of old, leafless trees that probably threw nice shade in the summer. Rusting cars with no wheels were scattered around in the tall grass next to the house, an impromptu junkyard.

  Although they were still distant from Happy Town, they kept lights to a minimum. Danny checked the house and looked inside several of the derelict cars. No zeroes present. They discussed staying in the house, but it had a lot of ground-floor windows and a wraparound porch, so they opted to stay inside the repair shop instead. There was a skylight and a ladder; they could get onto the roof if they had to, and by parking the rig alongside, they stood some chance of being able to effect an escape if it came to that. Vaxxine swore she could climb a ladder with her hands alone.

  Danny covered the one window with a rolling tool chest, then pulled the shutter doors down behind them. It had gotten bitterly cold again, but they opted not to stay inside the truck, as comfortable as the accommodations were. Something about their close call of earlier in the day had made it seem more like a claustrophobic tomb than a rolling apartment.

  • • •

  The next day came with a sparkling dust of frost on the ground and a sky that was overcast, but smooth and low, with benign if gloomy clouds. Vaxxine made more of the real coffee and Danny made a detailed inventory of their supplies, filling a rucksack she’d found in the abandoned house with simple survival items. She’d need them on her Happy Town recon mission. Vaxxine had insisted she should come along, but it was physically impossible. Danny planned to approach Happy Town on foot and circle it at a distance to understand the lay of the land there.

  It had been a long time since she needed woodcraft skills for a scouting sortie; the last occasion had been along the border of Iran, where she and a few other damn fools had spent the better part of a week crawling on their bellies toward a m
issile silo hidden in the desert. It turned out there was no silo. On the other hand, they hadn’t been detected by any of the goatherds in the area. There had been two of them. Danny anticipated this was going to be a much trickier assignment.

  Meanwhile, the Silent Kid and his dog were doing something peculiar. It looked pointless to Danny, until she realized they were playing. She hadn’t seen that in a long time. The dog was hanging on the end of an old rope by his jaws and the boy was swinging him around in circles. Vaxxine was engaged in a lengthy personal hygiene ritual inside the truck. While Danny was rolling a sleeping bag of Vaxxine’s into a thin, hard tube, so it would take up as little space as possible in the pack, a long-dormant part of Danny’s mind turned over and she had a kind of vision. Someone less inclined to hard-nosed reality would have recognized it as a daydream.

  It had to do with where they were. In the summer, it must be beautiful, a kind of forgotten corner of the world that hadn’t changed much since the 1950s. There were the trees, and a stream ran past the place. There were split-rail fences here and there. The nearest town was too far to see; there were two other houses within sight, old-fashioned places like this one. The house behind the auto repair shop was a story and a half, with attic bedrooms, a parlor enclosed by the porch downstairs, a screened summer kitchen at the back, and a small but dry basement. Enough room for the three of them and the dog. Surround it with fences and accordion wire, maybe dig a moat. Something. Secure the place, grow some corn, live quietly.